Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Fionna Barber (Manchester School of Art)

 

Professor Margaret Kelleher (University College Dublin)

Professor Margaret Kelleher is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Her biography Mary & Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dreamwas recently published by UCD Press.  Her 2018 book The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture and was shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize. She was UCD’s academic lead for the creation of the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. From 2022 to 2023 she was a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library and was Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge from 2023 to 2024.

 

Professor Derval Tubridy (Goldsmith University of London) 

Derval Tubridy is Emeritus Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London and former Chair of the British Association for Irish Studies. Author of Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (UCD Press, 2001) and Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), she has published extensively on Modernism and Irish Studies with a focus on literature, the visual arts, and performance. Her poetry is published in The Stinging Fly, Howl, The North, Southword and Banshee, and her debut chapbook I Will Say That (Smith|Doorstop, 2026) won The Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition. She is co-director of the London Beckett Seminar at the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths and the School of Advanced Study, University of London. A former Dean of the Graduate School, she has held grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Council, and the Fulbright Commission.

 

Invited Artists:

Jessica Traynor

 

Photo by Bríd O'Donovan.

Jessica Traynor is a poet and poetry editor at Banshee. Her debut, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. Her second collection, The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2019), was a 2019 Irish Times book of the year. Her third, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times poetry book of the year, and was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo Poetry Prize. New Arcana was published by Bloodaxe in 2025 and was an RTÉ and Irish Independent Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. Awards include the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Tundish Award from Field Day. 

 

Radvan Markus

Radvan Markus is associate professor in the Irish language and literature at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of Carnabhal na Marbh: Cré na Cille agus Litríocht an Domhain (2023), which was awarded the ACIS Prize for Books in the Irish Language, and Echoes of the Rebellion: The Year 1798 in Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction and Drama (2015). He has published widely on modern(ist) Irish-language prose and drama, focusing on the work of Pádraic Ó Conaire, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Flann O’Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Biddy Jenkinson and others. He also translates from Irish to Czech, his translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille won the prestigious Magnesia Litera award in 2018. Currently, he is working on a Czech translation of the medieval epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Apart from his academic work, he is also a musician (flute, whistles, bouzouki) who combines Irish traditional music with new compositions. He has recorded two CDs with the band Dún an Doras (Sweet and Sour, 2003; Rua, 2005) and in 2017, he founded the group Conamara Chaos, with whom he recorded the album Anord (2024).