Doireann Ní Ghríofa: Said the Dead

Doireann Ní Ghríofa will be in discussion with Mia Colleran about her latest book, Said the Dead. Weaving together autofiction, historical research and poetry, Doireann extends a long rope back through generations of women, binding past and present narrators together dangerously tight and, in doing so, creating a polyphonic history of an institution. In the present day, a woman becomes fixated on reading the early 20th-century casebooks from the Cork District Lunatic Asylum and follows the way each new female patient was scrupulously documented by Dr. Lucia Strangeman, the assistant medical officer at the asylum.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present. A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Prize, Book of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2020, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the author of seven critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Mia Colleran is a writer and editor with experience across publishing, bookselling, and journalism. She has had book reviews and features published in The Guardian, The Paris Review, and The Irish Times, among others.

Attendees can expect a wide-ranging discussion about the book spanning scholarship, the act of reading and the long echo of female voices present in Said the Dead.

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