The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies is partnering with the Museum of Literature Ireland (MOLI) to deliver an exciting new series of webinars.
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 characterized 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 a scholar of comparative literature. His novel, The First Verse, won a number of awards, including the Ferro-Grumley Prize for fiction. His most recent academic book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe, was awarded the René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016 by the American Comparative Literature Association. He holds the Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he splits his teaching between its campuses in the US and Europe. He is finishing a new novel which follows the life of a Dublin suburban cul-de-sac from 1982 to the present.