HOME
*





Aosdána
Aosdána ( , ; from , 'people of the arts') is an Irish association of artists. It was created in 1981 on the initiative of a group of writers with support from the country's Arts Council. Membership, which is by invitation from current members, is limited to 250 individuals; before 2005 it was limited to 200. Its governing body is called the Toscaireacht. Formation Aosdána was originally set up on the suggestion of writer Anthony Cronin, by ''Taoiseach'' Charles Haughey, well known for his support for the Arts, although Fintan O'Toole has argued that this also served to deflect criticism of Haughey's political actions. Membership The process of induction relies entirely on members proposing new members. Applications by artists themselves are not allowed. Cnuas Some members of Aosdána receive a stipend, called the ''Cnuas'' (, ; a gift of financial aid put aside for the purpose of support), from the Arts Council of Ireland. This stipend is intended to allow recipients to ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Edna O'Brien
Josephine Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021. O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, ''The Country Girls'' (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following the Second World War. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit. Faber and Faber published her memoir, '' Country Girl'', in 2012. O'Brien lives in London. O'Brien has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. Philip Roth described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while a former ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Brian Friel
Brian Patrick Friel (c. 9 January 1929 – 2 October 2015) was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. (subscription required). He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams. Recognised for early works such as ''Philadelphia, Here I Come!'' and '' Faith Healer'', Friel had 24 plays published in a career of more than a half-century. He was elected to the honorary position of Saoi of Aosdána. His plays were commonly produced on Broadway in New York City throughout this time, as well as in Ireland and the UK. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company and his play ''Translations'' was the company's first production. With Field Day, Friel collaborated ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Eamon Colman
Eamon Colman (born 1957) is an Irish painter. He is a member of Aosdána, an elite Irish association of artists. Early life Colman was born in Dublin in 1957. His father, Seámus Ó Colmáin, was an artist. Eamon Colman attended a Christian Brothers school; then Dalton School, a Jewish school in Rathmines; then a Protestant school. He worked as a labourer and studied landscape gardening. Career Colman studied at Trinity Arts Workshop and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD, Dublin), beginning his professional career in 1979. He had a major retrospective exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1997 and was elected to Aosdána in 2007. He was a member of the Toscaireacht, Aosdána's ten-member ruling committee, in 2020 and 2021. His paintings often depict the mountains of County Kilkenny and the nearby rivers, the Suir and Barrow. According to critic Aidan Dunne, Colman "built his reputation and following as a painter of works that combine an evident delight in ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’
''Irish Times,'' 30 August 2013.
Seamus Heaney obituary
''The Guardian,'' 30 August 2013.
Among his best-known works is '''' (1966), his first major published volume. H ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Roger Doyle
Roger Doyle (born 17 July 1949) is an Irish composer best known for his electro-acoustic work, for which he was made a Saoi of Aosdána, and for his piano music for theatre. Education Born in Malahide, County Dublin, Doyle studied piano from the age of nine. After leaving school he attended the Royal Irish Academy of Music for three years, studying composing, during which time he was awarded two composition scholarships. He also studied at the Institute of Sonology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and the Finnish Radio Experimental Music Studio on scholarships. Early work As a performer Doyle began as a drummer with the groups Supply Demand and Curve and Jazz Therapy, playing free improvisatory and fusion music. He released his first LP, ''Oizzo No'', in 1975, and his second, ''Thalia'', in 1978 on CBS Classics. ''Rapid Eye Movements'' (1981) was his third LP, and his attempt at a "masterpiece before the age of thirty". Electro-acoustic and other work Doyle be ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Imogen Stuart
Imogen Stuart (née Werner; born 1927) is a German-Irish sculptor. She is one of Ireland's best known sculptors with work in public and private collections throughout Europe and the U.S.. She was awarded the Mary McAuley medal in 2010 by President Mary McAleese, who paid tribute to her "genius", crafting "a canon of work that synthesises our complex past, present images and possible futures...as an intrinsic part of the narrative of modern Irish art, of Ireland." Life Born Imogen Werner in Berlin, she is the daughter of the art critic and author . She grew up in wartime Berlin, where she took up drawing and sculpting at a young age, encouraged by her father who played an important role in providing a forum for Bauhaus artists through his cultural magazine ', and after the war as Cultural Attache for the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington DC. Imogen knew very little about her Jewish origins until after the war. In 1945 Stuart began studying under Otto Hitzberger, who taugh ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Camille Souter
Camille Souter (born Betty Pamela Holmes, 1929) is an Irish abstract and landscape artist. She lives and works on Achill Island and has been an elected member of Aosdána since 1981. Early life Souter was born Betty Pamela Holmes in Northampton, England, in 1929 but she was raised in Ireland. Souter received a general education at Glengara Park School in Dun Laoghaire. She originally trained as a nurse at Guy's Hospital in London. Souter began painting, after attending art classes as part of occupational therapy whilst she recovered from tuberculosis on the Isle of Wight. Although largely self-taught, Souter took up sculpture in 1950 as her convalescence continued in Dublin. She was trained there by Yann Renard-Goulet. Souter returned to London and completed her nursing studies in 1952, before abandoning the profession in favour of painting. In 1953 she began to explore the medium of paint after visiting Italy. Early patrons of her work included Basil Goulding, Gordon Lambert ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


George Morrison (documentary Maker)
George Edward MorrisonPaul Levy, ‘FitzGibbon , Theodora (1916–1991)’, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 201/ref> (born 1922) is an Irish director of film documentaries. His works include 1959 documentary ''Mise Éire'' and ''Saoirse?''. Morrison was born in Tramore, County Waterford. His mother was an actress at Dublin's Gate Theatre, while his father worked as a neurological anaesthetist. Morrison studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin but dropped out in order to pursue his ambition to work in films. Early in his career he assisted director Hilton Edwards in two of the latter's films: ''From Time to Time'' and ''Hamlet of Elsinore''. For ''Mise Éire'', Morrison painstakingly assembled historical footage of the events surrounding the 1916 Rising from archives across Europe. The result, released by Gael Linn to great acclaim at the 1959 Cork Film Festival, was the first feature-length Irish language film ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Theo Dorgan
Theo Dorgan (born 1953) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer, translator, librettist and documentary screenwriter. He lives in Dublin. Life Dorgan was born in Cork in 1953 being second child born into a family of 8 boys and 8 girls to parents Bertie and Rosemary Dorgan, and was educated in North Monastery School. He completed a BA in English and Philosophy and a MA in English at University College Cork, after which he tutored and lectured in that University, while simultaneously Literature Officer with Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. He was visiting faculty at University of Southern Maine. He lives in Dublin with his partner, the poet and playwright Paula Meehan. Career After Theo Dorgan's first two collections, ''The Ordinary House of Love'' and ''Rosa Mundi'', went out of print, Dedalus Press reissued these two titles in a single volume ''What This Earth Cost Us''. He has also published a selected poems in Italian, ''La Case ai Margini del Mundo'', (Faenza, Moby Dick, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Anthony Cronin
Anthony Gerard Richard Cronin (28 December 1923 – 27 December 2016) was an Irish poetry, Irish poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor and barrister. Early life and family Cronin was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford on 28 December 1923. After obtaining a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, he entered the King's Inns and was later called to the Bar. Cronin was married to Thérèse Campbell, from whom he separated in the mid-1980s. She died in 1999. They had two daughters, Iseult and Sarah; Iseult was killed in a road accident in Spain. In his later years Cronin suffered from failing health, which prevented him from travelling abroad, thus limiting his dealings to local matters. He died on 27 December 2016, one day short of his 93rd birthday, having married a second wife, the writer Anne Haverty; his daughter Sarah also survived him. Activism Cronin is known as an arts activist as well as a writer. He was Cultural Adviser to the Taoiseach Cha ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Pearse Hutchinson
Pearse Hutchinson (16 February 1927 – 14 January 2012) was an Irish poet, broadcaster and translator. Childhood and education Hutchinson was born in Glasgow. His father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, was Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and was interned in Frongoch in 1919–21. His mother, Cathleen Sara, was born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, of emigrant parents from Donegal. She was a friend of Constance Markievicz. In response to a letter from Cathleen, Éamon de Valera found work in Dublin for Harry as a clerk in the Labour Exchange, and later he held a post in Stationery Office. Pearse was five years old when the family moved to Dublin, and was the last to be enrolled in St. Enda's School before it closed. He then went to school at the Christian Brothers, Synge Street where he learnt Irish and Latin. One of his close friends there was the poet and literary critic John Jordan. In 1948 he attended University Col ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Seóirse Bodley
Seóirse Bodley (first name pronounced ; born 4 April 1933) is an Irish composer and former associate professor of music at University College Dublin (UCD). He was the first composer to become a Saoi of Aosdána, in 2008. Bodley is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of twentieth-century art music in Ireland, having been "integral to Irish musical life since the second half of the twentieth century, not just as a composer, but also as a teacher, arranger, accompanist, adjudicator, broadcaster, and conductor". Biography Bodley was born George Pascal Bodley in Dublin. His father was George James Bodley (1879–1956), an employee of the London Midland & Scottish Railway Company (Dublin office), and later of the Ports and Docks Board. His mother, Mary (''née'' Gough, 1891–1977), worked for the Guinness brewery. He attended schools in the Dublin suburbs of Phibsboro and Glasnevin before he moved at the age of nine to an Irish-speaking Christian Brothers school at ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]