Reading the Future

"Who are the Irish writers working today who will be read in one hundred year's time?" 

That was the question that RTE put to a panel of scholars, editors and others. The result was a list of writers, each of whom will have a dialogue with Mike Murphy for a television and radio series "reading the future". This work includes an incisive introduction by Declan Kiberd, consulting editor to the RTE series and chairman of the selection panel. There will also be biographical notes on each writer and a chronology of Irish literature covering the period in which the selected writers have been working. The result is an insight into the lives and creative minds of 12 great writers such as Derek Mahon; John Banville; Marina Carr; Brian Friel; Seamus Heaney; Thomas Kinsella; Michael Longley; John McGahern; Tom Murphy; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill; Edna O'Brien; and William Trevor.

In 2000 Mike Murphy published 'Reading the Future' and accordingly Murphy has concurred that 'Mahon has produced a substantial body of literary criticism and journalism, and he is a distinguished translator and adapter of poetry and plays'.  To discuss his work Murphy was joined by the poet Vona Groarke, critic Hugh Haughton and poet and lecturer Gerald Dawe. When asked 'Can you place Mahon as a writer at the beginning of the twenty-first century?', Haughton argued that 'its always hard to place people.  Derek is wonderful about place and about the problem of historical placing.  He is one of the writers who has changed the course of Irish poetry.  He has opened up a new subject matter, written a new kind of poem, in touch with modernity in a way Irish poetry wasn't when he began writing in the sixties.  He is a poet who is always conscious of wider cultural forces'.