Event : 27 Apr 2013 20:30- 22:30
Venue: Town Hall Theatre
ADMISSION €12/€10
This pair of short-story heavyweights are interested in lives that are as remote as the places they inhabit. A film of Rash’s novel Serena will be released later this year. Keegan’s collections Walk the Blue Fields and Antarctica have both a beauty and menace to them. Rash – whose last collection Burning Bright won the Frank O’Connor Award – will read from his new selection of Appalachian tales, Nothing Gold Can Stay . (published in the Irish Times website Thu, Apr 25, 2013)
Join Cuirt for a special evening in the company of two literary giant sof the short story form, Ron Rash and Claire Keegan will treat the audiance to a reading of their work followed by a joint discussion with chairperson Matthew Ziruk.
Ron Rash
‘Ron Rash is a writer of quiet andstunning beauty… The stories in BurningBright are beautiful. Each story is luminescent, deeply communicative of Appalachia and perfectly framed with sentences both lyrical and grounded.’
— The Huffington Post
Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck, Ron Rash has earned international acclaim as one of the most gifted writers to emerge from North America in the last decade.
Rash is an award-winning poet, short-story writer and novelist. His books include: The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina, (1994), Eureka Mill, (1998), Casualties, (2000). Raising the Dead (poetry collection), (2002), One Foot in Eden, (2002), Saints at the River (2004) , The World Made Straight (2006) and The Cove (2012).
His most recent story collection, Burning Bright, won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and his previous novel, Serena, was a New York Times Bestseller and is soon to be released as a movie.
Rash, who has been twice shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award and has won the O Henry prize twice, currently holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.
Claire Keegan
‘Every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion’. -Hilary Mantel
Claire Keegan grew up on the Wicklow/Wexford border, studied Literature and Politics at Loyola University, New Orleans, and subsequently earned an MA at the University of Wales and an M.Phil at Trinity College, Dublin.
Her debut: Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories: ‘Among the finest recently written in English’.
In 2007, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles that year. Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford who said: “Keegan is a rarity-someone I will always want to read’’. The story was subsequently published by Faber, abridged for The New Yorker, shortlisted for the 2010 Kerry Fiction Prize and published in Best American Stories, 2010. Her stories have been translated into 12 languages.
A member of Aosdána, Keegan now lives on the Wexford coast.
‘The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savouring them many years from now and to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty new terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan’s fiction work’.
–The New York Times (Walk the Blue Fields review)
The View from The DJ booth 