Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Manuela Moser who was appointed Artistic Director of Cúirt Literary Festival last autumn was visibly delighted at the opening event on Tuesday in the Galway City Distillery. It was packed. Cúirt runs until this Sunday, April 23, and a few days before the launch, as she meets the Tribune, Manuela is hard at work on her inaugural event.

But she’s calm, if a little nervous about the fact that “everyone is telling me what a great festival it is”. She doesn’t want that to change on her debut outing.

With a programme that includes familiar and new voices, and explores themes from nature to gender to history, the ticket sales are healthy, so it’s a good start.

“I love literature, love reading and love poetry,” says Manuela as she explains that her aim with Cúirt was “to programme events and activities that the people of Galway would want to go to and, hopefully bring people to Galway too”.

English-born Manuela came to Galway from Belfast where she’d lived for 12 years, since arriving as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University. She has a PhD in Poetry from Queen’s Séamus Heaney Centre, where the focus is on poetry, research and creative writing.

She won the Heaney Centre’s inaugural fellowship in 2020 and has had her work published in publications, including the Stinging Fly. Manuela also co-founded and edited Lifeboat Press, which lists the anthology Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, edited by Paul Maddern, among its publications.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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