LOOK! IT'S A WOMAN WRITER

LOOK! IT'S A WOMAN WRITER  (ARLEN HOUSE, 2021)

There has never been a collection of essays quite like this one. Editor Éilís Ní Dhuibhne asked twenty-one* Irish women who were born in and around the 1950s to write about their writing lives and in this volume they tell it like it really was – and is.

 A harvest of writers -poets, fiction writers, playwrights, writers in Irish and English, from the North of Ireland and the South- take us with them on their journeys towards and beyond that holy grail, publication. Their accounts are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are lively and stunningly honest testimonies of the writing life. Collectively, thеse vivid and original essays provide us with a colourful and nuanced picture of Ireland’s literary landscape over the past half century from a woman’s point of view.

With a Foreword by Martina Devlin,  an Introduction by the editor and an Afterword by publisher Alan Hayes, this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in how Ireland, land of poets and scholars, finally began to value the voice of women in the late 20th century.

Women like us didn’t sprout by chance or because of any inherent exceptionalism. Quite simply, we benefited from opportunities denied to earlier generations. (Martina Devlin)

ESSAYS BY MARTINA DEVLIN, EILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE, CHERRY SMYTH, LIA MILLS, MOYA CANNON, ÁINE NÍ GHLINN, CATHERINE DUNNE, MARY Ó' DONNELL MARY O' MALLEY, RUTH CARR, EVELYN CONLON, ANNE DEVLIN, IVY BANNISTER, MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MARY DORCEY, CELIA DE FRÉINE, MÁIRÍDE WOODS, LIZ MCMANUS, MARY ROSE CALLAGHAN, AND PHYL HERBERT. AFTERWORD BY ALAN HAYES.

Available from all good bookshops and online bookstores, including

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