2 minutes with… Róisín Curé
Published 22/10/2021As if we weren’t excited enough about DBF2021, we sat down (via email!) with Róisín Curé for a quick chat about her event.
Róisín Curé is a leading figure in “Urban Sketching” – the practice of becoming immersed in your surroundings and capturing all you see and hear in a moment. She will be hosting a Sketching Drawalong in partnership with The Chester Beatty during Dublin Book Festival. Full details can be found here.


1) Tell us what is so great about Urban Sketching?
Urban sketching is the perfect antidote to a fast life filled with screens. When you take a pen to paper in a sketchbook, time seems to stop, you’re lost in the moment and nothing exists but you and your subject. Will it move? Is the light about to change? There’s something so beautiful about this pure focus: it fixes your brain in a way none of us who sketch can understand. The most neurotic, the most fretful of us becomes calm through sketching.
That’s what’s so great about urban sketching. Other things are: you’re never bored; you stop worrying about anything other than your subject when you’re sketching (such as, why is this plane jumping around so much); your life will be full of line and colour, chosen according to YOUR personal tastes; you have lovely, rich memories of places you’ve visited…the list goes on.
2) What are your favourite places to sketch?
I have two places that I particularly love to sketch. One is anywhere industrial that’s full of machinery, and the other is anywhere there are people sitting around, whether family, friends or strangers, as there is nothing like capturing an off-guard moment in our fellow humans.

3) What can attendees expect from your DBF event?
Attendees will see me sketch a scene from my Dublin book, in fountain pen and watercolour, and talk about my experience of sketching live on the streets of the capital. They can join in from their places, or they can just watch and pick up a few tips. If they want to join in, they’ll need a sketchbook suitable for watercolour, a pen or pencil (if you want to colour, a tiny box of watercolours and a waterbrush or two is great for adding colour, but remember your kitchen paper to clean between colours). Much of this will be provided by Chester Beatty but you can’t go wrong by bringing your own materials. There will only be 15 attendees so everyone will be spread out…that’s the idea anyway.
4) What other Dublin Book Festival event are you most excited about?
I would love to attend the Crime in the City event on 9th November: I envy those with an ability to write fiction, as much as I adore writing non-fiction, and I am intrigued as to how the urban environments of each of the speakers affects their writing.
Tickets for Roisin’s event are very limited so do book early.
You can also register for Crime in the City while you’re there.
