Ash Keys Michael Longley in conversation with Olivia O’Leary

In Partnership with dlr Libraries / Poetry Ireland

Michael Longley’s Ash Keys: New Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape) looks back on his extraordinary career, showing how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty. Join Michael in conversation with journalist and writer Olivia O’Leary.

This event takes place in the Studio on Level 1 of dlr LexIcon (next to Ink Café).

Michael Longley’s thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he and his wife the critic Edna Longley live and work. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.

© Nick Bradshaw

Olivia O’Leary is a journalist and broadcaster. She has presented current affairs programmes for RTE, BBC and ITV. In recent years she presented RTE Radio One’s ‘The Poetry Programme’. TheO’Brien Press has published two collections of her radio columns for RTE’s Drivetime-‘Politicians and Other Animals’ , and ‘Party Animals’. She has won three Jacob’s awards for her work with RTE and a Sony Award for the BBC Radio 4 series, ‘Between Ourselves’.