Sunday Miscellany at 50
To celebrate the weekend magazine show’s halfcentury, Miscellany50 is a weekend festival at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin from December 7 to 9. The event presents ve fulllength concerts over three days as well as a free admission Miscellany50 Listening Lounge open through the weekend. 50 writers will contribute especially composed pieces connected to a particular year between 1968 and 2017. Music comes from the weekend’s house band in residence, the ConTempo String Quartet who will take part in an eclectic mix of 50 music/song performance in the ve concerts, with some specially commissioned pieces being premiered from Irish composers Donnacha Dennehy, Jennifer Walsh, Niall Vallely and Michael Houlihan. Each concert will capture a decade as follows:
Saturday, December 8 at 3pm
1978-87 (introduced by poet Mary O’Malley)
Includes Martina Devlin; John Connell, author of The Cow Book
– A story of Life on an Irish Farm which won the 2018 Irish Book Award in the Popular Non-Fiction Book category; poet Michael O’Loughlin; cultural historian Paul Rouse; poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa; Sunday Miscellany stalwart and Kerryman Cyril Kelly; and journalist and critic Alannah Hopkin.
Subjects include the phenomenon of moving statues, Vietnamese boat people, nding true love, Irish college, the death of a mother and milliner, hitching to a Siouxie and the Banshees gig in the Stadium in Dublin and Bobby Sands’ song I Wish I was Back Home in Derry, which will be sung live by Christy Moore.
Saturday, December 8 at 7.30pm
1988-97 (introduced by writer Joseph O’Connor)
Includes Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Sinéad Gleeson, Claire Kilroy, Brian Leyden, Rosaleen MacDonagh, Dermot Bolger and Irish language poet Simon Ó Faoláin.
Subjects include watching television spectacles from Riverdance to Italia ’90; what we wore and how we wore it – goth fashion statements; Pavee Point; sleeping on other people’s couches; earning a living as a writer; and the trials and tribulations of buying a rst house.
Sunday, December 9 at 12 noon
1998-2007 (introduced by playwright Colin Murphy)
Includes writers, poets and bloggers Stephen James Smith, Kevin Barry, Caitriona Kalky (this year’s Rooney Prize winner), John MacKenna and Barbara Scully.
Subjects include GAA All-Ireland rivalries; the 9/11 attacks; Nelson Mandela and the jinx of the Millennium and adapting to new technologies.
Sunday, 9 December 9 at 4pm
2008-2017 (introduced by writer Lisa McInerney)
Includes essayist Emilie Pine (another Irish Book Award winner this year), Mary Morrissy, actor Janet Moran, Danielle McLaughlin, John F Deane, Jessica Traynor and broadcaster John Kelly. Subjects include motherhood, coping with illness, extra-mural classes, waiting for news on a parent’s illness in another country and Steve Jobs.
Tickets for the ve Miscellany50 concerts on December 7,
8 & 9 are selling fast, so check out the Project Box O ce at projectartscentre.ie or call 01-881 9613.