The Irish Pages Press – förlag

The brutal war launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or Operations Swords of Iron to give it its official name, was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the eighth Israeli military offensive in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead of December 2008. It was also the most savage, destructive, and lethal attack with a death toll that exceeded by far the combined total of the previous seven offensives. In this book Avi Shlaim places Israel’s policy towards the Gaza Strip under an uncompromising lens. He argues that these recurrent attacks – what Israeli generals chillingly call “mowing the lawn” – are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism whose basic objective is the elimination of the native population.

Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Ba n MacIntyre, rendering it into English.Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre's poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version.

“Scotland” is another essential issue from Irish Pages, the island’s leading literary journal. The issue is a cultural state-of-the-union for Scotland in the aftermath of the 2014 Referendum, with some incisive politics and a section of poems by Scotland’s leading and emerging poets. The Guest Editors are Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s Makar or national poet laureate, and Don Paterson, celebrated Scottish poet and former Poetry Editor at Picador Books. This issue is sure to sell quite hugely in Scotland.

A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. “So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence, and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in this book, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the United States and further afield...” Including four last poems by Seamus Heaney, this truly commemorative volume is sure to sell in very large numbers. Sven Birkerts and Helen Vendler on the man and the poet. A Suite of Obituaries & Global Reminiscences by leading poets and writers in Ireland, Britain and the United States. Poems by Kerry Hardie, Michael Coady, Paddy Bushe, Kathleen Jamie, Katie Donovan, Seán Lysaght, Damian Smyth, Ignatius McGovern, John F. Deane, Francis Harvey, Michael Longley, Alan Gillis, Moya Cannon and Harry Clifton. President Michael D. Higgins on John Hewitt & Richard Murphy on poetry and terror. Writing in Irish from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and others. PLUS: “Seamus Justin Heaney 1939-2013”, a unique photographic portfolio by Bobbie Hanvey.

Following in the footsteps of Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll’s 1956 classic Irish Journal, Hugo Hamilton revisits Boll’s evocations of 18 places across the island to take stock of the changes that have occurred over the last seven decades in Ireland. Part travelogue, part memoir, part social commentary, and part comic masterpiece, this latest offering from one of Ireland’s best-selling authors (his memoir The Speckled People, his five novels) is sure to sell in very large numbers. Whereas Heinrich Böll visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a bank manager’s home in Mayo, the streets and shops of Limerick and the lighthouse on Clare Island, Hugo Hamilton visits the deserted village on Achill Island, Croke Park in Dublin, a barbershop in Limerick, Turlough Park House in County Mayo, a police station in Prague, the church on Clare Island and a classroom in Bucharest.

This third volume of Patricia Craig’s trilogy or memoir – following her celebrated Asking for Trouble and A Twisted Root: Ancestral Entanglements in Ireland – takes its title from Louis MacNeice: “My diehard countrymen like drayhorses/drag their ruin behind them”. A memoir of her upbringing in Belfast and life in London, from the 1960s onwards – but with scenes from childhood, adolescence, and later. A view of the Troubles from elsewhere but based on a strong familiarity with Belfast attitudes and exigencies. Some dramatic incidents not in the public sphere – for example, the funeral of hunger-striker Joe McDonnell – are included. Much brilliant literary content is covered, as well as personal involvement with some notable Belfast characters, such as Sinn Féin’s Rita O’Hare, a close friend from schooldays (though later estranged).

Rotten London, Rotten Elsewhere: Letters To Power is a collection of letters written to people in positions of authority and influence between 2008 and 2023. This is Ahmed Olayinka Sule’s first book. Born and raised in London, educated in Nigeria, he now lives in his home city. Most of these letters highlight injustices perpetuated by the powerful in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. They are addressed to presidents, prime ministers, newspaper editors, pastors, supranational institutions, sporting bodies and business leaders. The messages exist in various forms, including classic letters, rejoinders, appeals, epistles, open letters and satires. However, they all share one overriding message: Injustice must stop.

A long-awaited collection of superb and distinctive essays moving between Ireland and the Balkans, often considering parallels between Belfast and Sarajevo in such well-known work as “A Week in Sarajevo”, “Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998”, “Troubled Belfast”, “A Day with the VJ”, “The Ethnic Basis of Irish Poetry” and “The View from the Lagan”. An immigrant and distinguished poet, Agee brings a unique perspective to life in Ireland and the Balkans with their communal and sectarian histories. Agee is a writer particularly concerned with the “ethical imagination” as exemplified by his “poetic work of nonfiction” Trump Rant, a nuanced exploration of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. He divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.

A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island’s premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press (“British Book Award Small Press of the Year 2022, Island of Ireland”). With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The 2025 Irish Pages Literary Diary is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world. The Diary features classic texts by celebrated authors such as Kathleen Jamie, Susan Sontag, Patricia Craig, Slavenka Drakulić, Julia Kristeva and Chinua Achebe, as well as the remarkable work of emerging writers living in Ireland. The Diary includes quotations in English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish, offering illuminating insights and literary passages throughout the year.

In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, the acclaimed Belfast filmmaker and BBC author Mark Cousins reflects on his prolific career in documentary-making, meditating on the philosophers, writers, actors and films that have influenced him. From recollections of his childhood in Belfast to practical filmmaking advice for new directors, to the complexities of representing trauma on screen, this is a book that will captivate any readers interested in contemporary film and the history of cinema. Cousins’ essays are in conversation with iconic artistic figures, particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian poet, filmmaker, writer and intellectual; and Orson Welles, an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. He is also in dialogue D.H. Lawrence; film-directors Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda; actors Amy Adams, Channing Tatum, Quentin Tarantino, Tilda Swinton, Nicole Kidman and Dennis Hopper; screenwriter Paul Schrader; and last but not least, himself. The book will also feature an Introduction by Fintan O’Toole, a polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, and the author of the best-selling memoir We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.