Lucy Collins, Viviana Fiorentino and Liz McManus will engage in a dialogue about the cultural silence surrounding generations of women writers in 20th century Ireland. The event is a curated conversation and reading centred on the recovery of two significant, yet historically sidelined, Irish women poets: May Morton (1876-1957) and Freda Laughton (1907-1995). It will explore how translation serves as a tool for legacy-building and how these two poets – a twentieth-century ground-breaking Irish poet rediscovered in the archives, the other a “Lady Gregory of PEN” from Belfast – challenge the traditional Irish poetic canon.
A wine reception and book sales will follow the event.
Presented in association with Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann
Lucy Collins is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. Her books include Poetry by Women in Ireland 1870–1970: A Critical Anthology and a monograph, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement – both published by Liverpool University Press. She is co-founder of the IrishPoetry Reading Archive, a national digital repository.
Viviana Fiorentino is a PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre. A poet and translator, her work was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2025, and appears in The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. It was also featured on RTÉ 1. She is a winner of the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Prize. In Italy she published a novel and two poetry collections.
Liz McManus is an award-winning writer and former Minister of State. Her novels are Acts of Subversion (1991), Shadow in the Yard (2015), and When Things Come to Light (2023). She is the editor of May Morton: Phantom Poet, published by Arlen House in 2025. Her latest book is Tiny Bruises (2026). She holds an MPhil and a PhD in Creative Writing.
Photo credit: Tom Honan.
