In 2017, I made a phone call to my husband and fellow writer, David Butler, who was attending an event in Galway, saying, “Guess what? We’re going to start up our own literary festival.” This enthusiastic outburst was, initially, met with silence, but being used to my impulsive ideas and my propensity for organising, David soon came round.
At this point, we’d already been running a monthly event called Staccato in Toner’s pub in Dublin. We had a dedicated following, and I wanted to do something bigger. There was no similar event in Bray, where we lived, and so this was our opportunity to introduce a wealth of writers to the community.
Five years on, Bray Literary Festival has hosted about 200 writers, including headliners such as Anne Enright, John Boyne, Jess Kidd, Roddy Doyle, Paul Lynch and Ross O’Carroll Kelly. This year we are delighted to host, in conjunction with the Mermaid Arts Centre, interviews with Booker-shortlisted author Claire Keegan and bestselling author Donal Ryan.
At our previous (digital) festival in 2020, Dublin Unesco City of Literature came on board to support an event with the then One Dublin One Book choice, Christine Dwyer Hickey, for her novel Tatty. We are thrilled to continue this partnership and this year’s festival will see the now re-branded One Dublin One Book support an event with the 2021 and 2022 selections, Rónán Hession with Leonard & Hungry Paul and Nuala O’Connor with Nora, on Friday, September 30th in Bray Town Hall.
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This year’s festival is the biggest yet, kicking off on Thursday, September 29th with an event featuring Mary O’ Donnell, Mark Granier and Ciaran O’Rourke and running until the evening of Sunday, October 2nd, wrapping up with an event on Writing and Neurodivergency with poets Colin Dardis and Rosamund Taylor. We will host 50 writers over the four days of the festival, and will launch, as always, on Culture Night, with an event called Reviving Forgotten Women – an evening of music and poetry in Bray library with Catherine Ann Cullen, Imogen Gunner, Supriya Dhaliwhal and Emily Cooper.
This year’s festival, which is to be our grand finale, has something for everyone. I’m proud to say that we’ve included a really eclectic mix of writers across a wide spectrum when it comes to age, gender and cultural diversity. So why wrap things up when we have gone from strength to strength over the last five years? To return to that phone call when the idea took told… I was blissfully unaware at the time of the amount of work that hosting a festival would entail from filling out forms for funding, to dealing with all kinds of bureaucracy, as well as the joy of being artistic director.
I have been at the helm since the festival’s inception in 2017 and am incredibly proud of what we as a committee have achieved. I am also extremely grateful for financial support from the Arts Council of Ireland, Leader and the ACNI among other private organisations through the years. Bray Literary Festival is registered as a charitable organisation and is run by a committee of writers who volunteer their time and expertise to execute the festival each year. This year’s committee is comprised of myself, David Butler, Brian Kirk, Philip Lynch and Ann Tannam.
In previous years, other writers such as Catherine Dunne, Breda Wall Ryan, Nessa O’Mahony, Liz McManus and Edward O’Dwyer have been involved, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their time. An organisation such as this is, unfortunately, unsustainable for a number of reasons. The primary one being that six months of the year is taken up with festival organisation. This is unpaid work, but most importantly it is time taken from our writing schedules, and as most writers will agree, time is the most precious thing for any writer -without it we cannot produce the work we need to.
In 2021, due to Covid 19, we decided to take a year out from the festival, and this enabled me to take up the post of Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at University of Galway. Opportunities such as these are invaluable to writers, and with more time in my schedule, I hope to be in a position to avail of what comes my way, as I’m sure do my BLF colleagues. And so… to that end, we have decided to wrap up what has been a wonderful and exciting project over the past five years.
But be assured that we are going out with a bang! We dearly hope that you will join us live in Bray for the plethora of events that we have planned for you. Events range from interviews, to poetry readings, panel discussions, writing workshops, and to our annual Stinging Fly literary lecture, which will be delivered this year by Kevin Power, author of White City.
This is a thank you and an adieu to all who have supported us over the years – and with plenty of personal projects in the pipeline, we hope to see you, not as organisers, but as writers, at all of the other wonderful literary festivals we are lucky enough enjoy on this island!
Check out our full programme at brayliteraryfestival.com
