Join Professor Barry McCrea with writer Belinda McKeon in this edition of Ireland’s Generation X?, a series of conversations about Ireland’s in-between generation.
“Generation X” describes the group of people born between 1965 and 1985, a generation caught between Baby Boomers and Millennials characterised by anti-establishment slacker culture, cynicism, irony, and— after the global economic crash — negative equity. An American term describing American lives, the moniker perhaps fails to accurately represent the experience of those who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland. This series invites artists and writers who grew up in an Ireland shaped by the Troubles, social justice movements, EU membership, the Peace Process, and the Celtic Tiger, to share their work and reflect on the social and cultural influences at home and abroad.
Belinda McKeon is the author of the novels Solace and Tender, which won and were nominated for awards including the Irish Book of the Year 2011 and the Encore Prize 2016. Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies and journals, most recently Granta and Being Various: Faber New Irish Stories. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University, where she has taught fiction since 2015. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in upstate New York.
Barry McCrea is a novelist and scholar of modern European, Latin American, and Irish literature. He most recent book is Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016. He is the author of The First Verse, a novel, winner of a number of awards including the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble “Discover” prize, and of In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (Columbia University Press, 2011), which won the Yale Heyman Prize for scholarship in the humanities. Professor McCrea holds has a BA in Romance languages from Trinity College Dublin, and a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton. He is Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English, Irish Language and Literature, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Before joining Notre Dame, he taught comparative literature at Yale University, where he was appointed full professor in 2012.
Presented by MoLI in partnership with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
