Please join us to celebrate the launch of Vinegar Hill, the debut collection of poetry from acclaimed writer Colm Tóibín, recipient of the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2021. Hosting the reading will be poet and publisher John McAuliffe, joining Colm to discuss the new book. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Vinegar Hill is the highly anticipated first collection of poetry by one of the notable novelists and essayists of our time. The book takes its title from the site of the battle between Irish rebels and British forces in 1798 near the author’s native Enniscorthy, County Wexford. His subjects are accordingly radical, including changing Dublin, life and death in the pandemic, gay marriage rights and rites, childhood, bereavement and religion. His interest in poetry is lifelong and the poems of Vinegar Hill, much of it written as he was being treated for cancer, are mature and complex.

His world may start in County Wexford but it becomes wide with his travels in the United States, the Iberian peninsula and other far-flung geographies. The clarity of his writing and the narratives that underpin his lyrics, elegies, personal poems and satires, reveal the impact of his long discipline as a novelist (ten volumes including The Master, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary and Nora Webster and House of Names) and story writer. Followers of his fiction will relish the opportunity to encounter Tóibín in verse. This rich collection, written over several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion, and humor, Tóibín offers us poems to provoke, ponder, and cherish.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.