Emily building on the ‘core value of Cúirt’

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Literature is a source of joy and comfort and escape but it’s also a way of engaging with what’s happening, and of empathising with people on the other side of the world who are going through things we know nothing about.” So says the Programme Director of Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Emily Cullen,

The Leitrim woman who has a PhD in English from NUIG and is an accomplished harpist, worked as an administrator with Amharclann de hÍde in the late 1990s before going on to serve as Arts Officer at NUIG. In that capacity, she established the annual Múscailt Festival. She’s a published poet too, with two collections under her belt. She took up the role of Cúirt Programme Director last May.

As an audience member of Cúirt for many years, Emily appreciates the Festival’s importance to Galway and says it’s both a privilege and a responsibility to be its Programme Director.

Her first task when she took up the job last year, was to make contact with publishers. She also established a Cúirt reading panel to get a diverse range of views about possible literary guests.

“Then there was a broad process of coming up with themes – thinking ‘what is relevant and contemporary and will resonate with a broad public’,” she explains.

There’s a generous spread of music, visual and digital arts this year – Emily wants to programme a Festival that combines “literature and the sister arts”.

That’s not diluting the essence of the Festival in any way, she adds.

“The core value of Cúirt will always be literature. Bringing in other art forms helps expand our perspective and refreshes our view,” she asserts. Cúirt initially started out as a poetry festival back in the 1980s and that remains central.

There’s poetry from Eleanor Hooker and Joseph Woods, from Sinéad Morrissey and Dajit Nagra, and from Imtiaz Dharker and Pascale Petit among others.

The first invite to this year’s Cúirt was sent to Bernard MacLaverty just year, after the release of his latest novel, Midwinter.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.