In cooperation with Gender Studies, Irish novelist and short story writer Evelyn Conlon will speak on "Hiroshima, the Famine and Grannies Who Have a Good Time" at 3:00 PM on Thursday, November 4th in 424 Flanner Hall. This reading has been shortlisted for the "Fall, 2010 Most Notable Event Title" award.
Evelyn Conlon is an Irish novelist and short story writer. An elected member of Aosdána, the Irish honours for distinguished artistic work, she has been writer-in-residence in many countries and at University College Dublin. A clear-sighted, observant and unsentimental thinker, her work is suffused with originality and surprising wit. Born in Co. Monaghan, she is now resident in Dublin. She is currently working on a novel Records on Globe Street which comments on the human and personal dimensions of loss and dislocation by addressing the transport of Irish famine orphan girls to Australia in the wake of the Great Famine. Her earlier work Stars in the Daytime, A Glassful of Letters and Skin of Dreams deal variously with social and political dilemmas in Irish life and the profundity of the death penalty; her edited works include work by Bosnian refugees in Ireland (1995) and Later On, (2004) a memorial anthology of prose and poetry which marked the 30-year memory of the Monaghan bombing.