Cúirt proceeds in modified form as an online festival

Cúirt International Festival of Literature cannot proceed in its usual format this month because of Covid-19, but all is not lost.

A digital festival is being held, with events being broadcast online, free of charge, between Thursday April 23, to Saturday, April 25.

These will include Jan Carson and Kevin Barry in conversation with Peggy Hughes; Eimear McBride with Edel Coffey; Sara Baume in conversation with Sinéad Gleeson; Elaine Feeney in conversation with Lisa McInerney; Róisín Kelly and Michael Gorman, Mary Costello and Alan McMonagle, plus additional events with authors Owudinni Mustapha and Carolyn Forché. All these will be broadcast on the Cúirt YouTube channel.

In a challenging year for the arts and for authors around the globe, Cúirt wants to support the two groups that make the festival special; its authors and its audiences, explains Festival Director, Sasha de Buyl.

“Books are, to quote Stephen King, a uniquely portable magic and we’re lucky in this time of shutdown that the ideas, voices and conversations that make our festival special, can still be brought to our audiences. We have looked at how we can reshape a selection of our events into a digital format, spanning podcasts, video events and social media activity, so that audiences, no matter their preference, can engage with us.”

All events will be free but audiences will be able to support the festival through donations if they wish, and all events will be available to watch again after Cúirt online has finished.

“All donations will go towards the payment of our authors’ fees for the digital festival,” she stresses.

The shutdown means that book-lovers cannot congregate as normal at events and the Cúirt festival club, but there will still be plenty to keep people happy.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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