The Seamus Heaney Centre Podcas‪t‬ The Seamus Heaney Centre Podcast

In this episode, we join three writers, each completing their creative PhD with us. With diverse interests across literature and art, their conversation covers the shared ground of their academic journey, and the context of a pandemic - how it has influenced the stories they tell, and how they tell them.

The Seamus Heaney Centre Podcast is created in a small back room by Stephen Sexton and Rachel Brown. This episode was produced, and featured original music by Conor McCafferty.

In this guest episode, Gerald Dawe looks back over his writing and publishing career of 40 years to reflect on the violence of our recent past. In the voice of a clock; reflected in a WW2 film; in dreams of Winston Churchill, violence is never far from the homestead. Nor is the Europe of the present far from the Europe of the past where immigrant families aim for America and hit on Belfast. We’re grateful to Gerry for this generous reflection across his poems; across our history.

In this episode, we hear some of the new poems made during our annual Poetry Summer School, which is led by Nick Laird. The Summer School ran online for the first time this year, and so instead of reading their work to an audience in Belfast, participants in this year’s summer school have each recorded a poem or two in their own homes, for a virtual Summer School Showcase.

In this showcase episode, we hear some short excerpts of new work by a few of our students from the Masters in Creative Writing.
The featured writers include Will Reade, Aisling Daly, Oisin Colligan, Stephen Brown, Daniel Paton, Anne Bodel, Hasan Shah, and Sionnán Ní Nualláin. Please note there is some strong language from the outset.

In this episode we hear from screenwriter Jed Mercurio, in an interview with our lecturer Tim Loane. This recording captures an online session with Jed and our students, during the lockdown of spring 2020.