Northern Ireland
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Northern Irish writer - what does that label mean? Lucy Caldwell compares notes with Caroline Magennis about the way authors are charting change and setting down experience - from working class memoirs of life in Derry to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Sinéad Morrissey and others. And as we approach the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland, Anne McElvoy talks to Roy Foster and Charles Townshend about the history and legacy of partition.
Charles Townshend is Professor Emeritus of International History at Keele University, and Roy Foster is Professor and Honorary Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford. Amongst other titles, Roy Foster is the author of Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, and Charles Townshend's new book is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925.
Lucy Caldwell's new book is called Intimacies and is published in May, and she has also edited Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. In the interview she recommends books including the writing of Mary Beckett, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Woman Writers from the North of Ireland edited by Sinéad Gleeson, and Inventory: A River, A City, A Family by Darran Anderson.
Caroline Magennis is Reader in 20th and 21st Century Literature at the University of Salford, and her upcoming publication, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures, will be available in August.
Producer: Emma Wallace
If you want more conversations with writers from Northern Ireland you can find the following episodes on the Free Thinking website: Sinéad Morrissey on winning the TS Eliot Prize in 2014 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03pdf10 Michael Longley talks about his poetry and winning the PEN Pinter prize - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098hz1m Bernard MacClaverty talks to Anne McElvoy about depicting love and loss in a long relationship in his novel Midwinter Break - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09525cn Ruth Dudley Edwards looks at ideas about belonging - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h2g4 Roy Foster and Paul Muldoon are in conversation - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050xpsd
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm Anne McElvoy presenter of free thinking and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:37.1 | In the show today, we'll be commemorating the partition of Northern Ireland a hundred years |
| 0:41.2 | on with a cast of eminent historians and we'll be hearing from literary voices reflecting |
| 0:47.2 | on how writers experience Northern Ireland now. Do have a listen. |
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| 1:30.9 | When George VIII attended the opening of Northern Ireland's first Parliament in Belfast |
| 1:35.6 | on the 22nd of June 1921, he wished all Irishmen forbearance and conciliation. |
| 1:43.3 | The vaunted solution to decades of strife over |
| 1:46.1 | home rule bills for Ireland was separate parliaments in Dublin and Belfast and that heralded |
| 1:52.2 | the partition of the Island of Ireland and the establishment of a separate jurisdiction of |
| 1:58.1 | Northern Ireland. Ireland was divided between mainly Catholic nationalists, pushing for independence, and |
| 2:05.2 | unionists, largely Protestant, insisting on remaining British. |
| 2:09.9 | As one MP said in a decisive speech in the Commons, it was absolutely impossible to fuse |
... |
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