Free event but booking required: book online at Laois Libraries events, phone Portlaoise Library on 057 8622333 or email portlaoiselibrary@laoiscoco.ie
Translating Ireland presents Sinéad Mac Aodha, the Executive Director of Literature Ireland, in conversation with Laois author, Helen Cullen. Together they will explore the work of this important national agency that is responsible for the international promotion of Irish Literature. A not-for-profit organisation, Literature Ireland is funded by Culture Ireland and the Arts Council: it has funded the translation of over 2,500 works of Irish literature into 58 languages around the world. Helen will also share her insights, as an author of novels published in translation, on the experience of being translated and the positive impact of the work on the career of Irish authors.
Sinéad Mac Aodha is the Director of Literature Ireland, the national agency for the promotion of Irish literature abroad. She recently co-edited an anthology of Irish short stories in Spanish, Cuentos irlandeses contemporáneos. She served as the Irish expert on the European Union OMC Working Group on Translation and Multilingualism. Current projects include curating an exhibition of Irish authors' photographs at the European Parliament in Brussels and organising a conference celebrating Ireland's many European literary translators. She was Managing Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris from 2016-2017. Sinéad currently sits on a number of literature and translation prize juries.
Helen Cullen is an Irish novelist, born and raised in Portlaoise, who lives now in Winchester. Helen has published two novels to date, The Lost Letters of William Woolf and The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually, with Penguin Random House in Ireland and the UK, Harper Collins in North America and in translation to numerous foreign markets. Her debut novel also garnered Helen a Best Newcomer nomination at the Irish Book Awards. Helen's third novel, Iseult, will be published in February 2027: this is the first novel in what will be the House of Gonne duology. Iseult reimagines the extraordinary life of Iseult Gonne, daughter of Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne and the child genius who was destined to become a muse to W.B. Yeats. Before publishing, Helen worked previously at RTE and subsequently in marketing in London for Google UK. Helen holds a B.A. Communications, M.A. Theatre Studies, M.A. English Literature and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is also a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, a literary critic for the Irish Times newspaper and a writer for the Sunday Times Magazine.
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tel.: 057 866 4033/13
email: artsoff@laoiscoco.ie
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