Pre-concert talk by Angela Bourke, author of biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker.​ 7:15pm​

Concert 8pm: Emilie Conway Quartet with Readings by Cathy Belton
​Emilie Conway - voice, Darragh Hennessy - piano, Damian Evans - bass, Dominic Mullan - drums

2017 marks writer Maeve Brennan’s centenary. Described by Anne Enright as "a true daughter of the Rising," Maeve grew up in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh, before moving to the US in 1934 when her father became Ireland's first Ambassador to Washington. In 1949 she became a staff writer for The New Yorker and wrote Talk of the Town columns under the pseudonym, the Long-Winded Lady.

Following a sell out performance at Ranelagh Arts Centre in February which led to invitations to perform in NYC and Chicago earlier this year, the Emilie Conway Quartet is delighted to be joined by actress Cathy Belton, and Angela Bourke to explore the soundscape of Maeve’s life and work with readings, spoken word, and music that ranges from traditional Irish to jazz. The evening's performance follows Maeve's journey from post-civil war Ireland to the glamour of cosmopolitan New York in the 1950s and takes inspiration from her writing.​ Indeed,​ Maeve’s columns for The New Yorker read like jazz: their cleverness, lightness and incisiveness show the dexterity of a master improviser which belie a deeper, Rembrandt-like meditation on the human condition - so hauntingly audible in the ballad-like quality of her short stories and her novella.

Cathy Belton is a multi-award winning actress of theatre, TV and film whose film credits include: Philomena, A Little Chaos, Intermission, The Tiger’s Tail. Television credits include: Glenroe, The Clinic, and Red Rock for which she was nominated for an IFTA award in 2015. She performs regularly in the Abbey and Gate Theatre: The Crucible, (Abbey Theatre), A View from the Bridge, (The Gate), Medea (Abbey Theatre), A Woman of No Importance, (Gate). She also performed in Wonderful Tennessee, (Sheffield Theatre) and in the world premiere of Frank McGuinness’s one-woman play The Match Box, at the Galway Arts Festival.

Emilie Conway is an award-winning Dublin-born jazz singer. A recent review by Golden Plec stated, "her own vocalese to Coltrane’s solo demonstrating her abilities to their fullest, flitting through the lyrics at a tempo most rappers would be envious of, while maintaining a bouncing melody and clarity of diction throughout. ” Hot Press called her "Star of the show." She released her debut album, The Secret of a Rose, in 2012, to critical and popular acclaim and Dear World: Emilie Conway Sings Alec Wilder in 2016. She performs in Ireland and internationally.

Award-winning writer Angela Bourke is Professor Emerita in Modern Irish at UCD, Dublin, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. A frequent contributor to TV, radio, and print media, she has lectured widely and held visiting academic positions on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan. Along with the ground-breaking 2004 Brennan biography, her books include Caoineadh na dTrí Muire (1983), By Salt Water (short stories, 1996), The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999), and the Famine Folio Voices Underfoot: Memory, Forgetting, and Oral Verbal Art (2016).

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