Gerald Dawe 
The Wrong Country 
Essays on Modern Irish Writing

This engaging, personal chronicle by Irish poet Gerald Dawe explores the lives and times of leading Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and Stewart Parker, alongside lesser-known names from the earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as Ethna Carberry, Alice Milligan, Joseph Campbell and George Reavey. It also portrays the changing cultural backgrounds of the author’s contemporaries, such as Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Colm Tóibín, Leontia Flynn and Sinéad Morrissey. Gerald Dawe presents an accessible view of modern Irish literature, filtered perceptively through his own distinctive lens, and raises important questions about cultural belonging, the commercialisation of contemporary writing, and the influence of Irish literary culture in a digital age. In this lyrical exploration of national identity, The Wrong Country repositions our understanding of modern Irish writing in a wider context for today’s readers.

A propos de l’auteur

Gerald Dawe is an Irish poet and Professor Emeritus and Fellow, Trinity College Dublin. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008), Selected Poems (2012) and Mickey Finn’s Air (2014). He has also edited Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry, 1914–1945 (2008) and the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018) and published several books of literary essays including Of War and War’s Alarms (2015) and In Another World: Van Morrison and Belfast (2017). He lives in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.