Join Carcanet poets Leeanne Quinn and Martina Evans in launching their new collections at Books Upstairs! With introductions on the night by Mary O’Donnell and Moya Cannon. All are welcome to attend and refreshments will be served.
Attendance is free but booking is essential.
ABOUT THE COLLECTIONS
Landscape with Question is the first creative work to extensively engage with one of Ireland’s leading Modernist artists, Nano Reid. The temporal and geographic layers of Reid’s paintings, the complex psychological interiority of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, the movements of tides and the pattern of human and animal life in urban landscapes all serve as constellations for the speaker of this pan-European quest narrative by award-winning Irish poet Leeanne Quinn.
Drunken Driving is the funny and subversive sequel to Martina Evans’s narrative poem The Coming Thing, set ten years on. Imelda, now a young mother, is married to Carl. When she gets a job in the X-ray Department at Pentonville Prison and learns to drive, her previous preoccupations with life and death and abuse of power are intensified within the prison walls.
ABOUT THE POETS
LEEANNE QUINN’S debut collection of poetry, Before You (Dedalus Press, 2012), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives (Dedalus Press, 2020), was noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus Press, 2022) and is the editor of Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025). Originally from Drogheda and Monasterboice, Co. Louth, she has lived in Germany, Austria, and is now based in Limerick, Ireland.
MARTINA EVANS is an Irish poet and novelist. She grew up in County Cork and is the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry. American Mules (2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. The Coming Thing (2023) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize and PEN/Heaney Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews poetry for the Irish Times. Her forthcoming collection Drunken Driving (2026) is a Poetry Book Society Summer Choice.