In September 2021, The Shaking Bog Festival had the immense pleasure of welcoming renowned poet Michael Longley to the Glencree Valley, County Wicklow. This Christmas offering looks back to the archive and presents the full version of this memorable reading and conversation with Dr Margaret Kelleher. We hope it might be something to sink into and provide solace and hope as the solstice comes in and the new year dawns.

Produced by The Shaking Bog in collaboration with Coillte Nature and Mermaid Arts Centre. Written & presented by Catherine Nunes, edited by Bjorn MacGiolla, mixed and recorded by Steve McGrath, with theme music composed by Ray Harmon.

Further information:

Michael Longley - One of Northern Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets, Michael Longley was born on July 27, 1939. He is renowned for the quiet beauty of his compact, meditative lyrics. He is the author of many poetry collections, including Angel Hill (2017); The Stairwell (2015), which received the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Ghost Orchid (2012); The Weather in Japan (2000), which won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2001 Longley was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

“Longley’s poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover’s fingers wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae.” – Seamus Heaney

Professor Margaret Kelleher MRIA - is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. She is a Board Member of the Museum of Literature Ireland and was academic lead for UCD in the foundation of this landmark public humanities initiative and collaboration with the National Library of Ireland. From October 2023 she will hold the Parnell Fellowship in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Margaret is former Chair of the Board of the Irish Film Institute. In Spring 2020 she was Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Glucksman House, New York University, and from September 2022 to May 2023 she was a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.

Episode5: Summer