³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

The 2020s have seen a flowering of Irish writing - Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín - to name but a few. But a century ago, the island was enjoying an equally glittering literary decade and today's programme is an eve of St Patrick's Day celebration of that time. We will hear from Nobel winners - George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House and WB Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium as well as extracts from Joyce's Ulysses, Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Katherine Tynan’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley and more. There is beauty, love and nature in these readings but you will hear, too, the shadow of conflict as well as rising concerns about the position of women and the power of elites in what was then a new nation. You will hear the music of Irish composers from the time from Hamilton Harty to Ina Boyle to Alicia Needham, from those who made Ireland their home like Michele Esposito and international composers inspired by the Island from Amy Beach to Arnold Bax and Percy Grainger. The readers are Ardal O’Hanlon and Olwen Fouéré.

Sailing to Byzantium by WB Yeats
Earthbound by Dorothy McArdle
Island Cross Talk by Tomás Ó Criomhthain
The Knight of Cheerful Countenance by Molly Keane
Thy Neighbours Wife by Liam O'Flaherty
The Wind That Shakes The Barley by Katherine Tynan
Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Munition Worker by Elizabeth Shane
Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien
The Quest by Eva Gore Booth
Crows by Padraig Colum
The Heart of the Wood translated from the Irish by Lady Augusta Gregory
Galway by Mary Davenport O'Neill
The Planters Daughter by Austin Clarke

Produced in Salford by Olive Clancy