One of three lectures with Nottingham Irish Studies Group this season

‘But what really happened?’: Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Anne Enright is one of the most innovative and exciting writers in Ireland today. Her work, with its dark humour and wryness, is able to be hilariously funny while dealing with serious subjects. Her career to date bookends the Celtic Tiger Ireland of the 1990s and early 2000s, and her work comments directly on the cultural climate of these years, considering the relationship between past and present, between how we remember and what we forget, both individually and at the level of the nation.

Enright’s interest in giving a voice to what has been silenced and repressed by history is matched by playful experiments with form and unreliable narrative, and an unnerving honesty.  Her novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker prize in 2007, begins with Veronica Hegarty, a Dublin housewife and very unreliable narrator, breaking the news of her brother Liam’s suicide to their mother. We follow her on her attempts to make sense of Liam’s life and death, and to try to uncover a hidden trauma –  which may or may not have happened, or which may have happened to her, rather than her brother – at the heart of the rackety Hegarty family’s life.

Sinead joined De Montfort University in 2014 as a Research Fellow and in 2016 was appointed a Senior Lecturer in English. Her research interests include Irish literature, modernism, the work of Samuel Beckett, and women’s writing, particularly Irish women’s writing of the late 19th and early 20th century, and contemporary writing. She has taught and published widely in these areas.

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk