Glor Theatre Clare Ireland

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Paul Durcan and Thomas Lynch: Readings and Public Interview

Paul Durcan was born and continues to live in Dublin in 1944. His first book, Endsville (1967) has been followed by twenty-one others, including The Berlin Wall Café (a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985), Daddy, Daddy (winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), The Art of Life (2004) and The Laughter of Mothers (2007). In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. He is a member of Aosdána.

Throughout his long career, Durcan has continued to make passionate and moving poetry out of his own and his country's misfortunes. He is by turns a surrealist, a mystic, an Irish comedian with perfect comic timing and an angry champion of the oppressed. His latest book Life is a Dream reaffirms the constant vision and artistic integrity of one of the most powerful, humane and original voices in modern poetry.


Thomas Lynch is a writer and a funeral director.  His collections of poems include Skating with Heather Grace, Grimalkin & Other Poems, and Still Life in Milford. The Undertaking, his first book of nonfiction won The American Book Award, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  It is published in eight languages.  Bodies in Motion and at Rest won the Great Lakes Book Award and Booking Passage, was named a 2006 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. A book of short stories, Apparition and Late Fictions, and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, will be published in 2010. 

His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Newsweek, Esquire, The New York Times, The Times of London and The Irish Times and has been broadcast by NPR, the BBC and RTE in Ireland.  The PBS/Frontline film, “The Undertaking,” based on his book and broadcast nationwide in October, 2007 won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts & Culture Documentary.  The Irish filmmaker, Cathal Black’s documentary, “Learning Gravity,” filmed in Michigan and West Clare, follows the tributaries of Lynch’s poems and essays. 

Thomas Lynch has read and lectured across the US, throughout Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and is an adjunct professor with the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.