The Wrong Country ― Essays on Modern Irish Writing

This engagingly personal chronicle by poet Gerald Dawe explores the lives and times of leading Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, James Plunkett, John McGahern, Stewart Parker and Leontia Flynn, alongside lesser-known names from the earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as Ethna Carberry, Alice Milligan, Joseph Campbell and George Reavey. The Wrong Country also portrays the changing cultural backgrounds of the author's contemporaries, such as Thomas Kilroy, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Colm Toibin, Hugo Hamilton, Sinead Morrissey and Michelle O'Sullivan. Gerald Dawe presents an accessible and jargon-free view of modern Irish literature, filtered perceptively through his own, warmly personal, lens, and raises important questions about cultural belonging, the commercialisation of contemporary writing, and the influence of Irish literary culture in a digital age, to reposition our understanding of Irish writing in a wider context for today's readers.

Gerald Dawe is an Irish poet and Professor Emeritus and Fellow, Trinity College Dublin. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008), Selected Poems (2012)and Mickey Finn’s Air (2014). He has also edited Earth Voices Whispering: Irish Poetry of War (2008) and the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018) and published several books of literary essays including Of War and War’s Alarms (2015) and In Another World: Van Morrison and Belfast (2017). He lives in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.