Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream

In partnership with the National Library of Ireland.

Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream (UCD Press) is an illuminating biography of two remarkable Irish writers: Padraic, a poet and playwright whose poems are still remembered today, and Mary, an influential writer and essayist whose work is now unjustly forgotten. Join us as author Margaret Kelleher discusses her book with Laureate of Irish Fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. The conversation will explore the Colums’ lives and careers, which span the Irish Literary Revival and twentieth-century literary circles in New York, and the challenges and rewards of writing a joint biography.

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Margaret Kelleher is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin and board member of the Museum of Literature Ireland. Her book The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (UCD Press, 2018) was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture and was shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize. She has published widely in the areas of Irish literary and cultural history. Margaret was Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library (2022 –2023) where she researched the library’s holdings of papers relating to writers Padraic and Mary Colum, housed in the Berg Collection, and she was Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge (2023 –2024). Her new book Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream is published by UCD Press.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin. She was awarded a Ph D in Irish Folklore from UCD in 1982, and is best known as a writer of fiction. Author of over 30 novels, short stories, memoir and drama her work her most recent books are Twelve Thousand Days: A Memoir (shortlisted for the Michel Déon Award 2020) and Little Red and Other Stories (Blackstaff 2020), Selected Stories (Blackstaff 2023), Milseog an tSamhraidh (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), and Look! It’s a Woman Writer! (Arlen House, 2021). She has been the recipient of many literary awards, including the Burns Literature Award, Stuart Parker Award for Drama, Bisto Book of the Year Award, many Oireachtas awards, and shortlisting for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In autumn 2020 she held the Burns Professorship at Boston College. She is a member of Aosdána, President of the Folklore of Ireland Society, and is the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2025-2028.

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