Irish poet for creative writing workshops

The Northern Irish poet and academic Sinéad Morrissey will lead two creative writing workshops at St James Cavalier, in Valletta on Tuesday and Wednesday between 7 and 9.30 p.m.

She will be reading her poetry to the general public in the Music Room at St James Cavalier on Friday November 28 at 7.30 p.m.

The writing workshops will be in English but the participants can write either in Maltese or in English. The fee for both workshops is Lm8.

On Monday, she will be one of the guests of literary appreciation group Poezijaplus in the courtyard of the Manoel Theatre at 7.30 p.m.

On Saturday November 29 at 9 a.m., Ms Morrissey will be presenting a paper entitled Why Teach Literature at a one-day seminar on new perspectives on Maltese literature organised by the Department of Maltese at the Junior College.

The seminar called It-Trankwillità Qarrieqa tat-Test (The deceitful tranquillity of text) is being held at St James Cavalier and also includes papers by Mario Cassar, Marco Galea, Adrian Grima, Immanuel Mifsud and Gorg Mifsud-Chircop.

Ms Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. She has written two collections of poetry published by Carcanet: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996) and Between Here and There (2002), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002.

She received the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1990, an Eric Gregory Award in 1996 and the Rupert and Eithne Strong Trust Award (2002).

She was writer-in-residence for the Poetry International at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 and is currently writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast.

She is now working on her third collection of poetry, provisionally entitled The Wound-Man, but she also plans to try her hand at prose.

She is being brought to Malta by The British Council and the cultural group Inizjamed in collaboration with the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity.

Tickets for the public reading on Friday November 28 are available from the St James Cavalier booking office.

http://inizjamed.cjb.net

http://www.britishcouncil.org/malta