Kildare Library Service

Bealtaine is Ireland’s national festival which celebrates the arts and creativity as we age. The festival is run by Age & Opportunity, the leading national development organisation improving the quality of life of people aged 50 – 100+.

Age & Opportunity Arts provides opportunities for older people to be more creative more often, to create meaningful participation and representation for all older people in cultural and creative life and to demonstrate and celebrate how our creative potential can improve with age. 

Bealtaine Book Club in partnership with the Irish Writers Centre: Paula Meehan in conversation with Mia Gallagher

Start Date: 20/05/2021 

Time of Event: 7pm 

Event Cost: €5 

This event is: Public 

Online or In-Person? Online

 County:Dublin – Dublin CityBook here

The Bealtaine Festival and The Irish Writers Centre present Bealtaine Book Club Author, Paula Meehan in conversation with Mia Gallagher about As If By Magic: Selected Poems and her writing career to date.

The Bealtaine Book Club aims to honour and promote an Irish writer with a distinguished and lengthy career who has made a significant contribution to literature. It also aims to encourage older readers and writers and to create a greater understanding of issues impacting on older age. 

In 2021, the Bealtaine Book Club author is Paula Meehan and the Bealtaine Book is As If By Magic: Selected Poems. This was selected by Libraries around Ireland as the Bealtaine Book Club book. Thanks to the Library Association of Ireland for their support in this event. 

As If By Magic gathers together work published between 1991 and 2016. Meehan’s devotion to, and mastery of, her craft, has always been one of the key signatures of her work, as has been her immersion in her beloved native Dublin. In As If By Magic we also see her uncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulse to bless the creation, to be grateful for her place in it.

Presented in partnership with the Irish Writers Centre.

For more information on Bealtaine Events download their programme of events.

We hope you will enjoy this event. Remember under the Government’s Keep Well Campaign – Switching off and being creative or learning something new, getting back to nature and finding ways to relax can help our general wellbeing. For more information check out our blog posts here and here or take a look at the Kildare County Council’s Keep Well page for the latest activities to help you Keep Well.