Queen’s Announces Seamus Heaney Fellows for 2024-25
Fiona Benson, Jan Carson, Declan Lawn, and Adam Patterson are the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellows for 2024-25.
Fiona Benson is the author of four poetry collections: Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, Ephemeron, and Midden Witch (forthcoming). All three of her published collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and her books have won the Forward Prize, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She won the Harper’s Bazaar short-story competition and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, the An Post Irish Short Story of the Year, and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. Jan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Screenwriters Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson met while working for the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, Panorama, spending a decade making investigative documentaries, both in the UK and around the world, before moving into drama. They wrote the hit drama The Salisbury Poisonings, which became the BBC’s most-watched drama of 2020 and was subsequently acquired by Netflix.
Their first feature-length film Rogue Agent, starring James Norton and Gemma Arterton, was released on U.K. Netflix and in U.S. theaters in 2022. Declan and Adam are currently working on the third and fourth series of their original scripted drama Blue Lights, about response police officers in Belfast.
The new Fellows will officially take up their posts in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s College Belfast in the New Year.
Branagh, Mulgrew, Joyce Onstage
‘Tis going to be a holly, jolly Irish season on the New York stage.
Kate Mulgrew (Orange is the New Black, Ryan’s Hope, Star Trek: Voyager) will star in The Beacon by Nancy Harris at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
Mulgrew will star through early November as a renowned artist living in West Cork whose estranged son has questions about his father’s mysterious death.
Meanwhile, Belfast native and Oscar winner Kenneth Branagh will star in King Lear, set in “the barbarous landscape of Ancient Britain,” and featuring performers from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Producers note that Branagh is completing a trifecta of great Shakespearean tragic roles, after past appearances as Hamlet in an Academy Award–nominated film, and on stage as Macbeth in an acclaimed 2014 immersive production.
Branagh’s Lear will run at the West Side Manhattan’s The Shed.
Finally, The American Irish Historical Society on Fifth Avenue, will again present the Irish Repertory Theatre’s “The Dead, 1904.” The immersive adaptation of James Joyce’s famous short story, will run from November 20 – January 5.
The play will be performed to an audience of about 50 people a night and the action takes place on three separate floors of the building, which has been restored to match period details. A holiday meal will also be served during the play, which follows a holiday gathering in the Dublin home of two elderly sisters.
For more information: https://Irishrep.org
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