Event type: Talk

Multi-award-winning novelist Eimear McBride chats to literary critic (and Irish literature fan) David Collard in an informal, friendly tête-à-tête.

Speaking to the Festival theme of ‘arrivals’, David Collard and Eimear McBride will discuss Eimear’s latest novel — The City Changes its Face — and her recent film debut (as a director) A Very Short Film About Longing (currently available on BBC iPlayer). Eimear (born in Liverpool to Irish parents) moved with her family to Ireland as a toddler. Her arrival on the literary scene was a long time coming – it took nine-years to find a publisher for her first novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Subsequently she has been internationally lauded for her unique blend of experimentation and very contemporary female-centred storytelling.

The author of two additional novels The Lesser Bohemians and Strange Hotel, as well as the non-fiction work Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust, Eimear held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre (University of Reading), during which she wrote Mouthpieces; three short powerful plays on the female experience. Her debut directorial work A Very Short Film About Longing (DMC Films/BBC) screened at the 2023 London Film Festival. Eimear is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Kerry Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

David Collard is the author of About a Girl (CB Editions) and Multiple Joyce and A Crumpled Swan (both published by Sagging Meniscus) and writes for the Times Literary Supplement. He curates and hosts the weekly online salon The Glue Factory.

Recorded exclusively for #LIF2025, this is the first of a series of Festival-linked Literary Salons we will run with David in the coming years.

Image credit: Kat Green (detail only).

♀️?

Often seen as dauntingly academic, James Joyce’s Ulysses is by contrast a book of life. 

Published in 1922, Ulysses is one of the most revered of novels; “the book to which we are all indebted” according to TS Eliot. It is Joyce’s reconstruction of Dublin, through memory, which has become a national Irish epic. Set over the course of a single day — 16 June 1904 — the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, Ulysses is a tribute to his lifelong partner.

Structured to mirror the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, the novel contains all of life, from the quotidian (daily) to the sublime. Catholicism, bar room song, toilet habits, philosophy, horse racing, infidelity, advertising slogans, gossip, sex and death all appear between its covers. Some said it was ‘not fit to read’. “If that is so”, said Joyce, “life’s not fit to live”. 

Ulysses gives readers three major characters and — with its Modernist style — access to their inner worlds. In Stephen and Bloom Joyce gives us youth and experience, intellect and practicality in attempt to marry those opposites. And yes, Molly gives us the second most famous soliloquy in literature.

You are invited to read the novel, chapter by chapter, whether it be your first time or a re-reading. Led by Ulysses enthusiast Jim Stanton, readers will discuss each chapter as a group, in a comfortable setting. Together you will build a democratic understanding of a democratic novel, in the knowledge that the more you each put into your understanding, research and openness to the language, the more you’ll gain collectively. Though each may read in isolation, the group will gain from a collaborative reading of Joyce’s unsurpassable novel.

The group will meet monthly on the fourth Monday of the month, through until Oct 2026. New paperback copies of Ulysses can be bought on Amazon for £3.99.

❤️??