maeve brennan

No 535 Maeve Brennan Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York by Angela Bourke

Maeve Brennan, like her fellow New Yorker writer Mary Lavin, is one of those Irish writers that everyone should have heard of, but whose body of work hasn’t received the attention it deserves. In Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York, Angela Bourke aims to redress that balance and to return Maeve…

A 3rd Birthday and a Giveaway!

Reading Ireland Month – Sin uile folks!*

*That’s all Folks! So there we have it. Another Reading Ireland Month/ Begorrathon is over and what a great month it was! With over 130 blog posts, an array of writers, poets, musicians and movies were explored. I read and reviewed 20 books by Irish authors, reduced the 746 by 10 and discovered many, many…

The Long Gaze Back – A Giveaway!

To celebrate Irish women writers, I am delighted to host a very exciting giveaway on the blog this week. I will be giving away a hardback copy of The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of short stories by Irish female writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson along with a copy of Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor,…

No 638 The Rose Garden by Maeve Brennan

That the work of Maeve Brennan was mainly out of print until the 1990s is surprising, to say the least. Maeve Brennan was born in 1917 in Dublin. Her father, Robert was deeply involved in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the political upheaval that followed and her childhood life was unsettled, with regular raids…

Putting Irish Women Writers back in the picture

Growing up in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, anyone interested in reading would be familiar with the Irish Writers poster. My Dad had the poster framed in his study and I had one on my bedroom wall, along with a set of Irish writers coasters. For several years I even had an Irish Writers…