Conflict and Creation Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Ciarán O’Rourke, Natalya Korniyenko and Suad Aldarra in conversation with Ailbhe McDaid and Julie Morrissy

In Partnership with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature

Join us for readings, screenings, and conversation with four leading writers and artists engaged with conflict and its related themes. Our award-winning speakers Atoosa Pour Hosseini (film), Ciarán O’Rourke (poetry), Natalya Korniyenko (journalism) and Suad Aldarra (non-fiction) will be in conversation with PATHOS Project team Ailbhe McDaid and Julie Morrissy. This event will spark nuanced discussions between our hosts, speakers and audience about the challenges and necessity of artmaking in times of global conflict.

This event features contributors from both the PATHOS project and War in Europe (Irish Pages).

There is a limited travel budget for those living in Direct Provision. Please email julie.morrissy@mic.ul.ie to avail.

Suad Aldarra is a Syrian writer and engineer based in Dublin. She is the winner of the Rooney Prize Award for Irish Literature 2024. Suad holds a Master’s in Data Analytics from the University of Galway. Suad’s debut memoir I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, published by Penguin in July 2022, and was shortlisted for An Post Irish Book Awards – Biography of the Year. Suad has written several pieces for the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, among other places.

Ciarán O’Rourke‘s second collection Phantom Gang was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. His first collection The Buried Breath was highly commended by the Forward Foundation in 2019. He is a previous winner of the Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Fish Poetry Prize, and the Westport Poetry Prize, among others. He lives in Dublin, where he works freelance as a reviewer and teacher. His third collection is forthcoming from The Irish Pages Press.

Atoosa Pour Hosseini is an Iranian-Irish visual artist and filmmaker based in Dublin. Pour Hosseini’s work is influenced by historical avant-garde cinema, and explores questions about illusion, reality, and perception through the media of film, performance, sculpture and installation. She has shown her work extensively and won numerous awards nationally and internationally. Her work is held in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Arts Council of Ireland as well as in private collections.

Natalya Korniyenko is a Ukrainian journalist, writer, and cultural manager who moved to Ireland in March 2022 because of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. She is the author of “Words and Bullets,” a collection of interviews featuring Ukrainian writers and journalists who transitioned into soldiers and volunteers during the Russo-Ukrainian War. For the interview with a Ukrainian poet and soldier, Maksym Kryvtsov, who was later killed by Russians on the frontline, Natalya was shortlisted for the “Professional Honor” Ukrainian Journalism Award. PEN Ukraine included her book “Words and Bullets” in their list of “The best books published in Ukraine in 2024.” In her essay “The Emigrant’s Tale,” published in the “Irish Pages: War in Europe” special issue, she describes her experience of the foreboding of the war, its first days, and fleeing to Ireland. Her current project is “Refugees: Stories of War and Emigration,” a collection of stories about Ukrainian female refugees who were forced to leave their homes and to start building lives abroad from scratch.

PATHOS is a Research Ireland-funded project, led by Dr Ailbhe McDaid (Mary Immaculate College) which documents the development of global ethical citizenship in Irish art and literature over the past one hundred years. The project situates Irish art practice in a global context by considering how international conflict reaches Irish shores. Find out more here

War in Europe, edited by Chris Agee and Askold Melnyczuk, published by Irish Pages, contains essays and poems in translation by many of Ukraine’s leading writers and scholars, along with work in English, further translations from other languages, plus two outstanding portfolios of photographs and art works.