Louth author to debut latest poetry very soon...

Dundalk's Jaki McCarrick’s debut poetry collection, Sweeney as a Girl, opens with the title poem which recasts the crazed king of Irish legend as a modern-day female struggling to cope with the distractions and pressures of our age.

London-born, and raised there and in Co Louth, again and again McCarrick is drawn to the exploration of difference, of otherness, her keen eye seeing never just place alone, for instance, but glimpses of the longer narratives (intact or
otherwise) of connection and belonging.

"When I was there I would think of here, the salt-blown air of this unregenerate town where alternate views of history can be found." 

READ NEXT: InterTradeIreland to host competition workshop in Louth

Throughout, the various roles of daughter, writer, friend, lover and neighbour are interrogated, with more than once an unfamiliar voice (from mythology or history or the world of art) delivering a surprising new perspective on what we thought
we knew or, as so often, take for granted.

Jaki McCarrick is a writer of plays, poetry and fiction, and the winner of the Papatango Prize for New Writing for her play
Leopoldville. Her play Belfast Girls was developed at the National Theatre Studio, London and has been staged numerous times internationally.

Her short story collection The Scattering was shortlisted for the 2014 Edge Hill Prize and includes the Wasafiri Prize- winning story, ‘The Visit’.

She was Writer in Residence at the Centre Cultural Irlandais in Paris (2013), and at the University of Leuven, Belgium.