Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – författare

'I caught a glimpse of him, behind the veil. And he knew I'd caught it. There was that understanding between us. We were members of the club of the X-ray eyes, the club of people who can see into the human heart.'Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's candid and moving memoir tells the story of her thirty-year relationship with the love of her life, internationally renowned folklorist Bo Almvqvist, capturing brilliantly the compromises and adjustments and phases of their relationship. Twelve Thousand Days is a remarkable story about love, grief and time, shot through with wry and sharp observations on Irish life, culture and morality.

‘All she wants is a new country, a new language, new food. New people, new stories ... She wants all this newness – which is as old as the hills – to encourage her, enclose her, remake her... She feels this, though she doesn’t really believe it.’In these eleven stories, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne draws us into the lives of characters struggling to find equilibrium. Visited by change and crisis, they are forced to confront the stories that define their sense of themselves and their place in the world.Beautifully written and sharply observed, this dazzling and daring collection is a deft exploration of the complexities of human desire – its darkness, its incoherence, its potential to help us tell a new story.

‘When the story is finished, Muriel and Polly sit in silence. The coloured lights on the fuchsia bush twinkle against the black sea and the black mountain and the black sky. They sit in silence. They let the story settle.’For almost forty years, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has captivated readers and critics alike with the dazzle and daring of her stories. Hailed as an original voice from her first collection, she has gone on to create a body of work that has established her as one of Ireland’s finest and most compelling storytellers.The fourteen stories gathered here demonstrate the breadth of Ní Dhuibhne’s achievement across her long writing career, particularly in terms of her depiction of the richly complex territory of women’s lives. They are testament to her great and enduring talent for weaving stories that draw us in and stay with us in the silence, long after the story has ended.‘A masterful storyteller, tonally adept at pivoting from searing and political, to comic and moving in a matter of pages.’SINÉAD GLEESON‘Ní Dhuibhne’s stories stand out for their superb sense of character and time and place.’COLM TÓIBÍN‘A fully contemporary writer working old magic; Ní Dhuibhne calls on ancient tradition to renew the way we see the world.’ANNE ENRIGHTStories: The Postmen’s Strike - Blood and Water - The Flowering - The Wife of Bath - Gweedore Girl -  Estonia - The Pale Gold of Alaska - The Banana Boat - A Literary Lunch - The Moon Shines Clear, The Horseman’s  Here - Bikes I have Lost - The Coast of Wales - New Zealand Flax - Little Red.

Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ní Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell, Mary O’Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Fréine, Máiríde Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.

WEB was the brainchild of Arlen House founder Catherine Rose, who appointed poet Eavan Boland as Creative Director. As an editor at Arlen House from 1978, Boland did much extraordinary work to develop, mentor and promote Irish women writers. The founders of WEB writers’ group initially met at these empowering, transformative workshops hosted by Boland, and they have been meeting continuously for almost forty years, making WEB one of the longest-running writing groups in Ireland. Over the decades, WEB writers and alumni have established highly-successful literary careers, publishing books, having plays and film scripts produced, and winning prestigious literary prizes. This anthology of new poetry, prose and drama, edited by Nessa O’Mahony, is dedicated to the memory of Eavan Boland.

The writers in Washing Windows Too have things on their minds that have exploded into that love-urgency that makes writers write. And, just as it should be, few subjects are off limits. A poet may not always love her inspirational material, but those here revere the act of writing so much - value it so much - that honing their ideas, visions, and insights into poem-shaped, concrete objects has become crucial. It is an honour to witness what has urged these writers to the process of thought, cogitation, sentence, and finally, poem.Many writers use writing as an attempt to solve life's conundrums - to solve themselves. And to understand the self and others better, too, because writing is the best way they know to gain sight into, and survive, the vagaries of life. Perhaps the writers in this anthology are like me - maybe for them, too, writing is their sanity and their joy, their best thinking and settling tool. A poem can be a path into the deepest, purest self, and back out again - through the very act of writing - to a calmer, less frenetic place.Because poets deal with issues that concern them - universal truths, often - certain themes emerge, as they do in all anthologies. In Washing Windows Too, particular groupings of motifs re-occur and these include birth and motherhood; child-love and empty nests; migration and refugees; women's power and agency; bodies, the male gaze, and violence; nature and its beauties; art, creation, and the act of writing itself; uneasy relationships; politics; health and illness; and grief and death. And, because we are living in the early twenty-twenties, the pandemic naturally features in some poems