Lismore’s travel writing festival only 2 weeks away
The much anticipated Immrama Travel Writing Festival in Lismore is fast approaching.
Among the speakers at this year’s event, which takes place in the heritage town from June 15-18th, are Isabel Conway and Matthew Jebb, who form part of a top class line-up for the 2023 event.
ISABEL CONWAY
Isabel is a multi-award winning travel writer, and was named the 2022 long haul Ireland Travel Extra Travel journalist of the year, a past winner three times of the overall award. With a passion for discovering new places, people and interesting experiences, she has chronicled stand-out moments in her award winning travel articles. In Varanasi, India, she was intensely moved by a Ganges Hindu cremation; while in poverty stricken Malawi, she met feisty women who set up a co-op to feed their families.
At Immrama, Isabel will give some insights into the life and times of the late Dervla Murphy, who pioneered a fearless and intrepid go it alone attitude to travel. In speaking about Dervla, Isabel says that she was ‘true to her convictions, with an almost resolute disregard for danger’.
‘Her innate curiosity propelled Dervla to seek out the new and unknown, setting out from her home here in Lismore to undertake extraordinary journeys for more than half a century. Her’s were very different travels to what most of us present day travel writers aspire to or have the guts and tenacity to attempt,” she said.
Long before travel made us conscious of our global responsibility, Dervla had already seen with her own eyes how mass tourism, the world’s largest industry, had ruined certain populous areas of the world. Her big hope was that more of us would travel with a conscience, once the budget airlines began filling up again after the end of the Covid pandemic with resumption of global travel.
MATTHEW JEBB
At Immrama, Matthew will talk on ‘In Search of the Gardens of Eden’. Matthew has travelled extensively in search of plants. His talk will explore the value of travelling, observing and taking delight in the natural world as one of the greatest inspirations in biological knowledge. After his talk, he will bring the group on a guided tour of Lismore Castle Gardens.
‘It is one of the most significant features of our biology that we are curious apes, it is what led us out of Africa, caused us to talk, make tools and art, and eventually develop our inquisitiveness about how the world works and what it is that first led us out of Africa, how we learned to talk, why we made tools’.
Dr. Matthew Jebb, a botanist, is director of the National Botanic Gardens. He studied as a taxonomist (biologist that groups organisms into categories) at Oxford University. He later lived in Papua New Guinea where he was involved in many collecting expeditions and the naming of numerous species.
Matthew has a fascination with the living world, stemming from his holidays spent amongst rock-pools, or in search of fossils, and his taxonomic work has concentrated on plants which have remarkable interactions with animal life, from carnivory to symbiosis.
He is a member of the European Consortium of Botanic Gardens, a member of the International Advisory Committee for Botanic Gardens Conservation International and was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society in 2022.
Profiles of just two of the speakers in this year’s festival, where other speakers include Lara Marlowe, Brian O’Donovan, Donal Brady and Tomi Reichental, along with Rosamund Burton and John Dwyer. For further festival details and booking, visit www.lismore-Immrama.com