ROTIMI ADEBARI

Rotimi Adebari is an elected member of Portlaoise Town Council and was elected Mayor of Portlaoise in June 2007. He is Chief Executive of Optimum Point Consultancy, an organisation that promotes cross-cultural understanding, and is a director on the boards of organisations that addresses social inclusion issues at local and national levels. He is a Social Entrepreneurs Ireland award Winner, Media and Multicultural Awards Special Judges Award Winner and Xclusive Magazine 2007 Person of the Year. In 2006 he launched the ‘Voices Across Cultures’ initiative, which promotes the integration of minority ethnic groups in Ireland. He is a guest lecturer in Dublin City University and has a Masters degree in Intercultural studies from the same university.   

Paul Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University, Belfast, since 1961. Born in Belfast in 1950, he is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was appointed a cross-bench member of the House of Lords in 2007. He is the author of seven books and co-author of six books on modern Irish history. These include Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006¸ published in 2007 as part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe; The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement (2007); Conflict and Conciliation in Irish Nationalism 1890-1910; a best-selling biography of Parnell; and Ideology and the Irish Question 1912-16.

Maureen Boyle grew up in Sion Mills in Co Tyrone and now lives in Belfast. She was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize in 2004. In 2007 she was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Yellow Nib, Fortnight magazine and a new publication called Incertus published in December 2007. She has completed a commission for the BBC for a poem to run through a documentary on the restoration of the Crown Bar. She works as a teacher and a children’s bookseller.

Ruth Carr is a poet, playwright and editor who was involved with the Word of Mouth collective in Belfast and was co-editor of The Honest Ulsterman for many years. She edited The Female Line (1985), the first anthology of poetry, fiction and drama by women to come out of Northern Ireland, and compiled the contemporary women’s fiction section of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (IV/V). She was a co-editor of HU (formerly The Honest Ulsterman) poetry magazine for 15 years. She is a founder member of the Word of Mouth poetry collective and was an associate lecturer in creative writing for the Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education. Her first collection, There is a House, was published to acclaim in 1999. Her second collection is due later this year.

Daragh Carville, born in Armagh, is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays, which include Language Roulette, Dumped, Observatory and Family Plot and have been widely produced in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland and the US. He was also one of the contributors to Convictions, the award-winning theatre event held at the Crumlin Road Courthouse, Belfast, in 2000. He has written for both television and radio. His radio play, Regenerations, first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2001, was nominated for the Richard Imison Award and his version of Bram Stoker's Dracula was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2003. He also edited New Soundings: An Anthology of New Writing from the North of Ireland (2003). Carville was the winner of the 1997 Stewart Parker Award and the 1998 Meyer-Whitworth Prize. He was Writer-in-Residence at Queen's University, Belfast from 1999 to 2002. His first feature film, Middletown, was released in 2006.

Born in New York City in 1941, Billy Collins is the author of several books of poetry, including She Was Just Seventeen (2006), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Nine Horses (2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Picnic, Lightning (1998) and The Art of Drowning (1995). A recording of Collins' reading 33 of his poems, The Best Cigarette, was released in 1997. His work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and has been chosen several times for the annual Best American Poetry series and he has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (2003), an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools. In 2001 Collins was named US Poet Laureate. His other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992 he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as 'Literary Lion'.

IMTIAZ DHARKER

Imtiaz Dharker is an accomplished poet, documentary film-maker and artist. Born in Pakistan, Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now divides her time between India, London and Wales. All her poetry collections – including Postcards from God (including Purdah) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001)and The terrorist at My Table (2006) – include her own drawings. She is included in the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets (2008) filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, with the accompanying anthology edited by Neil Astley.

RITA DUFFY

Belfast-born Rita Duffy is one of Northern Ireland’s best-known, groundbreaking visual artists. She received her BA at the Art and Design Centre and her MA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster and has achieved a long list of awards, medals and bursaries for her public and privately commissioned work. Her art is often autobiographical, including themes and images of Irish identity, history and politics. She has initiated several major collaborative art projects and was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects for her developmental work within the built environment. In November 2008 the 111 Foundation in London will present an important overview of her work from the past two decades.

JANE DURAN

Jane Duran is Cuban by birth, was brought up in the USA and Chile, and now lives in England. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, and selections have been published in Poetry Introduction 8 (1993), Making for Planet Alice (1997) and in La Generacion del Cordero (2000). Her debut collection, Breathe Now, Breathe (1995), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon published her second collection, Silences from the Spanish Civil War, in 2002. Duran's father, the composer Gustavo Duran, fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Republican army and went into exile after its defeat. This poem-sequence takes as its point of departure her father's silence about the war. Her most recent collection, Coastal, was published in 2006.She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2005.

MARY FITZGERALD

Mary Fitzgerald is the Irish Times' foreign affairs correspondent. From Cork, she began her career reporting on Northern Ireland for The Belfast Telegraph and international media. The only Irish journalist to be awarded the Lawrence Stern Fellowship at the Washington Post, she covered the 2004 US presidential election for that paper before moving to Jordan. She has worked across the Middle East, Africa and south Asia, reporting from countries including Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Chad, Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2006 she spent five months reporting on Islam in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey for The Irish Times after she was awarded the inaugural Douglas Gageby Fellowship. She has also worked on a number of award-winning radio documentaries for the BBC and is a frequent contributor to the Irish broadcast media.
 

Anne Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall, Co Antrim, and now lives in London. She teaches literature and creative-writing and is Chair of the UK Poetry Society. She has also run  the Coffee-House Poetry reading series at Earls Court’s famous Troubadour for the past 10 years. Her third poetry collection is The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).

HUGO HAMILTON

Dublin-based Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People, a prize-winning German-Irish memoir which has so far been translated into 15 languages and appeared on the New York Times notable books list. His equally ‘rich and compelling’ second memoir, The Sailor in the Wardrobe, which continues his complex dual upbringing in a ‘language war’ where he was prohibited from speaking English, has also been hailed  an ‘enchanting piece of work’ (Terry Eagleton). He is the acclaimed author of five novels and one collection of short stories, all of which reflect on the increasingly compelling issues of cultural divisions, belonging and identity. His new novel, Disguise, is to be published by 4th Estate in June 2008.    

MARTIN HAYES AND DENNIS CAHILL

Irish fiddle virtuoso Martin Hayes and American guitarist Dennis Cahill have garnered international distinction for taking traditional music to the very edge of the genre. They have recorded two critically acclaimed albums – The Lonesome Touch (1997) and Live in Seattle (1999) – and will be releasing their third duet album shortly. They have also recorded musical scores for theatre (A Skull in Conamara), film (a documentary on Dorothea Lange's photos of Ireland), contemporary dance (The Pat Graney Company's The Vivian Girls, premiered in February 2004) and an animated cartoon (Cuilin Dulainn, produced by the Kilkenny-based Cartoon Salon). Touring throughout the US and abroad, Hayes and Cahill have been universally recognised as a powerful force in the music world, grounding themselves in traditional Irish music while incorporating sensibilities from classical, blues and jazz. They have performed in China, Mexico and in Poland as President Mary McAleese’s special guests.

Maurice Hayes was born in Co Down in 1927. A former senior civil servant, He held senior rank through key periods in Northern Ireland’s recent history. He is a former Northern Ireland Ombudsman and Boundary Commissioner and was Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health and Social Services. He was also a member of the Patten Commission on Policing Reform which led to the reform of the setting up of the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. Hayes was an independent member of Seanad Éireann from 1997-2007, having been nominated by the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern. He is currently  chairman of the National Forum of Europe, Northern Ireland Screen and the Irish Language Broadcast Fund Sub- Committee. Hayes has written or contributed to major policy reports and written numerous pieces of journalism. He is the author of three books of memoirs: Sweet Killough: Let Go Your Anchor;Black Puddings with Slim: A Downpatrick Boyhood; and Minority Verdict: Experiences Of A Catholic Civil Servant. He was voted European Person of the Year in 2003.

SEAMUS HEANEY

Born in 1939, Seamus Heaney is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University in 1984 and held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1966 he published Death of a Naturalist. Since then he has published hundreds more poems, in such collections as District and Circle (2006); Opened Ground (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Spirit Level (1996); Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990); and Sweeney Astray (1984). He has also written several volumes of criticism, including The Redress of Poetry (1995). Heaney's most recent translation is Beowulf (2000), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Anna Lo is the Alliance assembly member for South Belfast. Born in Hong Kong, she worked in London for a year prior to coming to live in Northern Ireland in 1974. In 1978 she started the first English evening class for Chinese people in Northern Ireland. She joined the Chinese Welfare Association in 1987 as a community interpreter, later qualifying as a social worker before taking up the post of director in the Chinese Welfare Association in 1997. She was a founder member of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities and a commissioner for the first Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. She is a member of various equality committees including the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister Race Forum and Belfast City Council good relations panel.

PIARAS MAC EINRI

Piaras Mac Éinrí is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, UCC, with a specific interest in migration and integration issues. He is a member of the teaching team in UCC's interdisciplinary programme in European Studies. He was head of UCC's International Education Office from 1989 to 1994 and later director of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies from 1997 until 2003. Prior to his time at UCC he taught in the Université d'Orléans, France, and served for 11 years in the Department of Foreign Affairs, with postings in Brussels, Beirut and Paris. He first became interested in refugee issues through his personal encounters with Palestians in Lebanese refugee camps, before completing his postgraduate these in France on the 1980s generation of new Irish migrants to that country. He is now director and coordinator of UCC's MA Programme in Contemporary Migration and Diaspora Studies, the only such programme in the state.

Acclaimed stand-up comedian Kevin McAleer has been writing and performing for live shows, television and radio for 20 years. He began his comedy career back in the mists of 20th century London with his legendary slide show, a strange menagerie of owls, b-movie stills, animals and bric-a-brac, all woven together by his unlikely live commentary. It featured on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live and also two years running in the National Review of Live Art. Returning home to Ireland, he came to Irish attention following regular television exposure on RTE’s Nighthawks, leading to sell-out nationwide tours and the best-selling EMI video Turn It On. His latest show, Chalk & Cheese, was launched at Edinburgh Fringe, leading to a 45-date international tour which reached its climax with a two week sell-out run at London’s Soho Theatre.  

 

Now based in England, Roisin McAuley grew up in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, attended a convent boarding school and went to Queen’s University Belfast to study History. She joined BBC Northern Ireland as a newsreader and announcer, going on to become a reporter for BBC programmes such as Spotlight, Newsnight and Panorama. She has also produced and directed television documentaries for ITV and Channel 4 and has written and presented programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her first two novels, Singing Bird (2004) and Meeting Point (2005), were highly acclaimed and her next novel, Finding Home, is to be published in January 2009.
 

EAMONN McCANN

  

Eamonn McCann was born in Derry, where he still lives and works. He was involved in the early Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland and has since been active in a variety of grassroots campaigns. He is chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust, vice-chairman of Derry Trades Union Council and Northern Ireland representative on the National Executive of the National Union of Journalists. McCann opposed the Belfast Agreement on the ground that it consolidated the sectarian basis of the north's politics. He writes on politics, religion, sport and the arts. 

WJ (Bill) McCormack is Keeper of the Edward Worth Library (1733) in Dublin, having previously been Professor of Literary History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His biographical publications include Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (1980); Fool of the Family, a Life of JM Synge (2000); and Blood Kindred; W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics (2005). Under his poetical pseudonym, Hugh Maxton, he has also written an autobiography, Waking; an Irish Protestant Upbringing (1997). His most recent collection is Poems 2000-2005.

JOAN NEWMANN

Originally from Co Armagh and living in Co Donegal, Joan Newmann is a poet and teacher of creative writing. She was writer-in-residence for the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry, and the Northern Ireland Ireland Arts Council. She was a member of the Philip Hobsbaum Belfast Group – which included James Simmons and Seamus Heaney – which was at the centre of the poetry renaissance in Northern Ireland in the1960s. Her collections include Coming of Age (1995); Thin Ice (1999); with Kate Newmann, Belongings (2007); and Prone (2007). She is co-founder of Summer Palace Press and was the recipient of the Samhain International Poetry Festival’s Craobh na hÉigse Award in 2004. She has completed reading tours across Ireland as well as in England, Russia and the US and given readings with many poets including Seamus Heaney, Paula Meehan and Medbh McGuckian.  

CONOR O'CLERY

Born in Belfast and educated at Queen’s University Belfast, Conor O’Clery worked for The Irish Times for more than 30 years, mainly as foreign correspondent based in London, Moscow, Beijing and New York. He was twice Journalist of the Year in Ireland. He is the author of several books on Russia, Ireland and the US, including The Greening of the White House, an insider account of President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the Irish peace process. He has published a biography of the American philanthropist Chuck Feeney and will publish a retrospective on his career, May You Live in Interesting Times, in September 2008. In 2007 he received an honorary doctorate from Queen's University Belfast. 

MALACHI O'DOHERTY

Malachi O'Doherty is a Belfast-based writer and journalist. He specialises in political commentary and radio reportage. He is a regular contributer to Talkback, Hearts and Minds and Sunday Sequence on BBC Radio Ulster. His fourth book, Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat from Religion, will be published in autumn 2008 by Gill and Macmillan. O'Doherty's other books are: The Trouble With Guns (1998), I Was A Teenage Catholic (2003) and The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (2007).

ANDREW O'HAGAN

Andrew O'Hagan, born in Glasgow, is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. His acclaimed first book, The Missing (1995), was shortlisted for the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award. Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Personality (2003), won the 2003 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). In 2003 O'Hagan was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists. In 2004 he edited The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta, a collection of various writers' accounts of Kolkata, and, in 2008, a book of Robert Burns' poetry entitled A Night Out with Robert Burns. His latest novels are Be Near Me (2006) and The Atlantic Ocean (2008). O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, will be published in June 2008.

GLENN PATTERSON

Belfast-born Glenn Patterson received an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where he studied under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His first novel, Burning Your Own, was published in 1988 and won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Fat Lad was short-listed for the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award in 1992 and he has since published five more novels, the most recent of which was The Third Party (2007). Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times is to be published later in 2008. Patterson has been writer-in-residence at the University of East Anglia, UCC and QUB. A member of Aosdána, he has presented numerous television documentaries and an arts review series for RTE.

NUALA REILLY

Nuala Reilly was born in Armagh but has lived in Derry for many years. She is a member of the University of the Third Age and took part in the creative writing course in 1999 at the University of Ulster and at Queen’s University Belfast when Micheál Ó Conghaile was the writer-in-residence. Her poem Rang Potaireachta won The Strokestown Irish/Gaelic Language Poetry Competition 2005. Some of her poems were recorded at the launch of An Guth 4 in 2007. Her first collection, Magus Ballyrath, will be launched during the 2008 John Hewitt International Summer School.

MAURICE RIORDAN

Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, Co Cork, in 1953, and is a teacher, poet and editor. He is the author of A Word from the Loki (1995) and Floods (2000). A Word from the Loki was a Poetry Book Society choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, and Floods was shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award. A third book of poems, The Holy Land, was published in 2007. He has also edited the anthology A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2000) with science journalist Jon Turney. His Confidential Reports, translations of the Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud, was published in 2005. In 2004 he was selected as one of the Poetry Society's 'Next Generation' poets and in 2005 he became poetry editor of Poetry London.

FREDDIE ROKEM

Freddie Rokem is the Emanuel Herzikowitz Professor for 19th and 20th Century Art and teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also a permanent visiting Professor at Helsinki University, Finland. During 2007-2008 he was a visiting Professor at Stanford University, the Free University in Berlin and UC Berkeley. Rokem’s book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (2000) received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Prize for best theatre studies book in 2001. His most recent book, Strindberg’s Secret Codes, was published in 2004. Rokem is editor of Theatre Research International (2006-2009). He is also a translator and a dramaturg, is vice-president of Performance Studies International and is a member of the executive committee of The International Federation for Theatre Research. 

GEORGE WATSON

George Watson is Emeritus Professor of Irish Literature in English at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Yeats, Joyce, Synge and O'Casey; (second edition 1995); Drama (1983); and WB Yeats: Short Fiction (1995). He has written many essays on Irish literature and cultural politics and has lectured and taught extensively in Europe and the US. He is on the editorial board of the James Joyce Quarterly and was vice-chairman of the British Association of Irish Studies (1990-1995). He was director of the WB Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, 1998-2000, Mellon Fellow of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 2000-2001 and latterly director of Aberdeen’s Research Centre of Irish and Scottish Studies. 

PHILIP WATT

Philip Watt is director of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, a body funded by the Office for Integration and the European Union to address racism and to promote integration. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and postgraduate of the University of Ulster, Watt has been seconded twice to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform on anti-racist initiatives. Originally from north Belfast and living in Dublin since 1991, he is author/editor of a number of publications on racism and intercultural approaches to integration, including Responding to Racism in Ireland (2001) and a research project commissioned by the Centre for Cross Border Studies and the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland.

CLAIR WILLS

Clair Wills is Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on 20th century Irish literature and culture and contemporary English and American poetry, and her most recent book, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War, was published to acclaim in 2007.   It won the International PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and the Michael J Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, presented by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published books on Northern Irish Irish poetry and was an editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Women's Writing and Traditions.