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Gabriela Istoc
Soprano Gabriela Istoc, was born in Bacau, Romania and
began vocal studies at the age of fifteen. She obtained her Graduate
Diploma in 2007 at the Romanian National University of Music,
where she studied with Silvia Voinea. This June she was a finalist
of Belvedere Competition (Vienna) and recently, in Padua, she
won the Second Prize and the scholarship for the youngest singer
in the competition (Iris Adami Corradetti Competition). Ms. Istoc's
opera repertoire covers roles like Gluck's Eurydice (Orphe et
Eurydice), Serpina in La Serva Padrona (G.B. Pergolesi), The Countess
in Le Nozze di Figaro, Adina in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore or
Lauretta and Mimi in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and La Boheme.
Ms. Istoc is a post-graduate Recital Artist Diploma student at
the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, Ireland, where she
studies with the well-known artist-teacher Veronica Dunne. Gabriela
is currently a member of the Opera Theatre Company Young Associate.
Colette Davis
Has been Musical Director to Bunratty & Knappogue and Dungaire
Castles. She is currently Musical Director of the Voices of Limerick
and is well know as an accompanist to many of Ireland's leading
singers.
Mary Morrissy
is the author of two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender
and a collection of short stories, A Lazy
Eye.She has recently completed her third novel, The
Family Silver, inspired by the life of Bella O’Casey, sister
of the playwright Sean O’Casey. She reviews fiction for The
Irish Times and is a teacher of creative writing.
Honor O Brolchain
who has become a chronicler of the Plunkett family. She
edited her grandmother Geraldine Plunkett's papers in her book
All in the Blood The teacher, poet, writer and musician has edited
a vast trove of diaries, notes and memoirs written and recorded
by her grandmother, Geraldine Plunkett Dillon. She has transformed
what must have been a formidable pile into an accessible, conversational
personal record of the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence
by a woman who was never far from the hub of historic happenings.
John Boland
is Dublin-born and has worked in journalism all my adult
life. He was theatre and film critic with the Irish Press, literary
columnist for the Irish Times and is currently television critic
and books critic for the Irish Independent. He also contributes
regularly to RTE's Sunday Miscellany on literary, musical and
arts topics and has won an Arts Journalist of the Year award.
His first book of poems, Brow Head, was published in 1999.
Richard
Tillinghast
a native of Memphis, Tennessee, first came to Kinvara,
County Galway, for a year in 1990 on an Amy Lowell travel grant
and has long since been a distinctive presence on the Irish literary
scene. He now lives in South Tipperary. Selected
Poems is his tenth book of poems. He is also the author
of three non-fiction works including Damaged
Grandeur, a critical memoir of Robert Lowell, with whom
he studied at Harvard, and Finding Ireland:
A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture.
With his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast, he has recently published
Dirty August, a selection of their translations from the Turkish
poet Edip Cansever. Tillinghast has also been active as a critic,
travel writer and book reviewer for The Irish
Times, The New York Times, and
other periodicals. He has received grants from the Arts Council
of Ireland and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others,
and in 2008 was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University
of the South (Sewanee)
Andrew Miller
Novelist Andrew Miller was born in 1960 in Bristol, England, and
has lived and worked in several countries. He studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1991 and finished
a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing at Lancaster University
in 1995. His first novel, Ingenious Pain,
was published in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
(for fiction), the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and
the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize.. It was followed by Casanova
(1998), a fictional portrait of the infamous libertine and writer.
Both novels are currently being adapted for film. His next novel,
Oxygen (2001), set in England in 1997,
was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the
Whitbread Novel Award. Other novels include. The
Optimists (2005) and his latest is One
Morning Like a Bird (2008).
William Wall
Is a novelist and author of an acclaimed collected of short
stories, No Paradiso (2006). A full-time
writer from Cork, he was longlisted in 2005 for the Man Booker
Prize for his novel This is the Country,
shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes National Book Award and The
Young Mind Prize; in 2004 he won the Sean Ó Faoláin Award and
in 2003 was shortlisted for the Raymond Carver Prize. His novels
to date include The Map of Tenderness,
Minding Children and Alice
Falling; he is also a poet and author of a children's book.
Geraldine Sheridan
Professor of French at the University of Limerick and is
the author of an unusual and fascinating publication entitled
Louder than Words: Ways of Seeing Women Workers
in Eighteenth-Century France.
John Logan
Teaches history at the University of Limerick
Grace Wells
won the Eilís Dillon Best Newcomer Bisto Award for her
first book, the children's novel, 'Gyrfalcon',
which was also an International White Ravens' Choice. Children's
books, 'One World, Our World' and 'Ice-Dreams'
appeared in 2009. Her poetry and short stories have been published
widely and she reviews Irish poetry for the University of Chicago's
online literary journal, 'Contrary'.
Her first collection of poetry, 'When God
has been Called Away to Greater Things', will be published
by Dedalus Press in May 2010.
Hugh Maguire
Having lectured in Art and Architecture History in New
Zealand throughout the 1990s, Hugh worked as Museums and Archives
Officer with the heritage Council until taking up his recent appointment
as Director of the Hunt Museum, Limerick.
John Horgan
Is enjoying a life long fascination with music. He was
a member of the government appointed "Piano" group which examined
the role of the RTE Orchestras. He is currently a member of the
Board of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Describing himself as a
dilettante in musical matters, John is a former Chairman of the
Labour Court and now earns his living as a Human Resource Consultant
Ruth Padel
"Hopes are shy birds, flying at a great distance,"
the Haiti-born French immigrant John James Audubon wrote in his
diary in 1820, as he set off along the Ohio River leaving his
beloved wife and children to try and sell his bird drawings in
London.
Ruth Padel, is author of Darwin - A Life
in Poems and Tigers in Red Weather, is currently writing
a book of poems and prose on animal and human migration. She will
explore the relationship between feelings of marginality or estrangement
and the creative process of imagining and representing nature
in art and words. She will illustrate her talk with poems, passages
from her tiger conservation book, and her just-published debut
novel, Where the Serpent Lives.
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