Writing Strabane – Blessing a Town Into Poetry with Maureen Boyle

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Writing ‘Strabane’ – Blessing a Town Into Poetry

With Maureen Boyle

Thursday 24 October 2024, 1pm

Tower Museum, Derry

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In 2018 poet Maureen Boyle was commissioned by Radio 4 to write a poem on the town where her family came from for a series called ‘Conversations on a Bench’.  The poem was published in 2020 by Arlen House, Dublin, with photographs by her husband Malachi O’Doherty.  A musical setting of the poem, by composer Una Monaghan, premiered online during the pandemic. Journalist Nuala Mc Cann described the poem as, ‘a bittersweet, haunting love song to home’. In this talk, Maureen will explore the process of the poem’s creation, the motivation to write it, the research involved and the process of translating research into poetry.

About the speaker: Maureen Boyle began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at the age of eighteen. She studied in Trinity College, Dublin and has a Masters in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize, the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, the Fish Short Memoir Prize, the Inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Bursary and Awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.  Commissions include one to write a poem on the Crown Bar in Belfast for the BBC in 2008 and this year, for a poem on a painting in the O’Brien Collection in Washington.   Some of her work has been translated into German, Flemish and recently French, by fellow-Strabane poet Aidan Coyle.  She taught Creative Writing with the Open University and English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. She is a mentor in Memoir and Poetry at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin.  She has two full collections of poetry, ‘The Work of a Winter’, 2017 and ‘The Last Spring of the World’, 2022, both published by Arlen House, Dublin.

Admission Free / Light refreshments provided from 12:30pm before each talk

Please book your place by contacting the Tower Museum (028) 7137 2411 or email tower@derrystrabane.com

Entrance Fee