Books for Breakfast (Ireland)
A podcast focussing on fiction and poetry hosted by poets and writers Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley. Also features the Toaster Challenge where guest writers are given the time it takes to make toast to talk about a book that has resonated with them.
Episodes
On today’s episode poet and critic Adam Wyeth reviews nine new poetry collections. Under the microscope are Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke; Belfast Twilight by Liam Carson; Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ahley; Over Here by Alan Gillis; Chic to be Sad by Molly Twomey; New Arcana by Jesica Traynor; The Convent of Mercy by Tom French; À la Belle Étoile: The odyssey of Jeanne by Afric McGlinchey and Scaffold by Thomas Brezing. A ...
In this episode we invite Colm Tóibín to the breakfast table to discuss his new book A Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings. The book collects the blogs he wrote during his term as Laureate for Irish Fiction, one written each month on topics as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, reading Ulysses, the discomfort of Salman Rushdie in the wilds of County Dublin, Bob Dylan in concert, a life of Th...
On this morning's show novelist Henrietta McKervey talks to us about four recent novels: Fair Play by Louise Hegarty, Air by John Boyne, Murder takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman and Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
And she also does a surprising Toaster Challenge. Listen to see what she chooses ...
Henrietta McKervey is the author of the acclaimed novels What Becomes of Us, The Heart of Everyt...
This episode sees us visiting Dublin's historic United Arts Club where Enda interviews Mary O'Donnell about her latest collection of short stories, Walking Ghosts.
Praise for Walking Ghosts
'Each story shines in its own distinctive light.' —Neil Hegarty
'O'Donnell is unflinching in her ability to display humanity in all its flaws and vulnerabilities.' —Mary Costello
'The magic of h...
On this episode we drop in to the Carlow University Pittsburgh MFA summer programme in Trinity College, Dublin to interview Sarah Moss about her latest novel, Ripeness.
'Tender and rueful . . . Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence' - Emma Donoghue
'One of our greatest living writers' - Katherine May, author of Wintering
More Praise for Sarah Moss:
'Throws much contemporary writing into...
On this episode we talk about this year's International Literature Festival Dublin which runs from 16-25 May, and where Enda will be interviewing novelists Gethan Dick and Patrick Holloway. We also talk to Karin-Lin Greenberg about Your Are Here, her novel set in a dying mall in upstate New York.
"Lin-Greenberg’s web of characters illustrate the complex lives of ordinary people." —Laura Zornosa, Time
In this episode, on Poetry Day, we cross the Atlantic and. breakfast in Miami, where we talk to Cuban American poet Richard Blanco about his Homeland of my Body: New and Selected Poems, a rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with two full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his five previous volumes. We also feature this year’s Strokestown International Poetry Festival, including the...
On this episode we talk to poet novelist and critic Mary O’Donnell about Mary O’Malley’s The Shark Nursery, Patrick Holloway’s The Language of Remembering, ! All’ ARME /? by Eilish Martin and Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland, edited by Leeanne Quinn.
We also give a shout out to a special anthology for One Dublin One Book, Dublin, Written in our Hearts, published by the Stinging Fly Press...
Finding inspiration in the local and near at had, attentive to climate concern and global unrest, to home and homeless, belonging and welcome, concern and global and welcome – on today’s episode we talk to poet and publisher Pat Boran about his eight collection Hedge School.
'A writer of great tenderness and lyricism' – Agenda, UK
'... local and international, full of wisdom and wry humour ...' – Ir...
‘A beautiful tapestry of late middle age reckoning’ – today we interview the writer Mary Morrissy about her new collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision, published by Lilliput Press. For her Toaster Challenge, Mary chooses The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazard. Get the coffee on!
This episode is supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
Intro/outro music: Colm Mac Con Iomai...
Was 1950s Dublin really a place of murder and intrigue? On today’s show we travel to the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Dublin’s Fenian Street to talk to novelist John Banville about his latest novel, The Drowned, the fourth in a series featuring Detective Inspector St John Strafford and the pathologist Quirke familiar to many from the Benjamin Black novels. And we talk to Estonian poet Doris...
How much do we need to know about a writer's life? How does the life impinge on the work? What is the human price of art? In this episode we talk to biographer Adrian Frazier about John Montague: A Poet's Life.
‘The best Irish poet of his generation’ – Derek Mahon
Already a highly lauded biographer, Adrian Frazier was a close acquaintance of Montague for more than forty years. In this fully authorised narrativ...
In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life he...
On today’s show, the last of 2024, we talk to Keith Payne about his recent boat building and poem writing project. Currachs and naomhógs are among the only sea craft built upside down, and the expertise dates back generations. Keith learned all of this and a. lot more when he found himself working on a Dunfanaghy currach over 16 weeks. He was Cork City Library eco-poet in residence from 2022 to 2023 when he was drawn...
Join us for a lively discussion of some of the best books published this year. At the breakfast table to discuss their poetry and fiction choices are poet Adam Wyeth and novelist Henrietta McKervey. Plenty of stocking filler ideas here, and Peter and Enda also get to mention some of their own favourite books of the year. This is a double espresso and multiple pastry episode, so get that pot on the stove and get the ea...
This episode sees us back in Books Upstairs in Dublin’s D’Olier Street again. This time we’ve come for a conversation between Paddy Bushe and poet and academic Ben Keatinge on the occasion of the Dublin launch of The Amergin Step: An Exploration in the Imagination of Iveragh. The book is named after the famous poem that Leabhar Gabhála Éireann or The Book of Invasions tells us was recited by the poet and lawmaker of t...
As we write it is 1002 days since the fullscale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but over ten years since Putin first seized Crimea and sponsored insurrection in the Donbas. And even longer that he has sought to meddle in Ukrainian affairs. So we thought we would mark those suffering filled days and years by talking to Oksana Maksymchuk whose Still City: Diary of an Invasion, published by Carcanet Press, came out this y...
First up on today's show, I chat with Liam Carson, who is back again with another episode of the Irish language Festival, IMRAM.
And we hear from Kelly Michels, whose Forward Prize shortlisted debut collection, American Anthem, published by Gallery Press this year, focuses on the tragedies both personal and national, of the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects of addiction and of gun violence in...
Today's show features conversation and poems from two poets with new collections: Katie Donovan, whose collection May Swim, is published by Bloodaxe Books, and Micheál McCann, whose debut collection Devotion, is published by Gallery Press.
Both poets take on the Toaster Challenge, this time a Toaster Poem Challenge. Micheál' choce is Louise Glück's 'Sunset' from her collection The Wil...
We're back from the summer break and in conversation with Christine Dwyer Hickey, who was the subject of our very first Books for Breakfast podcast. This time around we're talking to her about her latest novel Our London Lives, just published this week.
We also give ourselves a double Toaster Challenge. Enda talks about Alba de Cespedes' Roman novel Forbidden Notebook, while Peter stays in Ro...
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