Join Dublin Art Book Fair Guest Curator Wendy Erskine in conversation with Rory Gallagher – Live! – From the Hotel of the Dead author Tim MacGabhann, and poet, novelist and translator Colm Breathnach.

Tim MacGabhann’s polyphonic Rory Gallagher – Live! – From the Hotel of the Dead is a compelling poetic work published in 2023 by Rough Trade Books. The publication is described as a poetic psychedelic bar crawl of the soul, with some sections spoken by the musician and others delivered by voices slipping in and out, altering our loci of place, time and consciousness. Join Wendy Erskine in conversation with Tim MacGabhann, and Colm Breathnach who translated the text into Irish for a discussion of people, voices and music.

Tim MacGabhann is an Irish novelist who divides his time between Mexico City and the UK, where he is doing a PhD. His first two novels, Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere, were published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2019 and 2020. Other fiction, non-fiction and poetry also appears in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, The Tangerine Magazine, Magma Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and Ambit.

Colm Breathnach is a poet, novelist and translator. He has published nine collections of poetry and a novel. He has won the principal poetry prize at the annual Oireachtas Literary Competitions on four occasions. The Irish American Cultural Institute presented him with the ‘Butler Prize’ in 1999. He has been awarded residencies in Ireland, China and Slovenia. Poems of his have been translated into eight languages. A new poetry collection, Breacadh an Lae, and a selected volume with English translations are forthcoming.

Wendy Erskine is Guest Curator of Dublin Art Book Fair 23: Polyphonic. She is the author of two prize-winning short story collections published by The Stinging Fly Press. She edited well I just kind of like it, an anthology of writing about art in the home, published by PVA Books. She is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and her non-fiction is widely published. In 2022, she was Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queen’s University and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a full-time secondary school teacher.

This event takes place as part of Dublin Art Book Fair 2023: Polyphonic, sponsored by Henry J Lyons and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

Image description: Two portraits side-by-side of Tim MacGabhann and Colm Breathnach. Left to right: (1) Tim has long brown hair, a beard and large tortoiseshell framed glasses and looks directly at the camera. He is wearing a dark blue shirt floral shirt and a light blue blazer. His shirt is unbuttoned at the top to partially show a tattoo of black gothic lettering. (2) Colm Breathnach is gently smiling and looking directly at the camera. He has straight short brown hair parted on the left and is wearing a white shirt and a black pinstripe blazer.