Deirdre Brennan

Stories from Belfast to Kerry, from the immigrant experience to the weight of tradition, these voices refuse easy comfort. They explore the raw territories of motherhood and loss, desire and betrayal and the clash between old certainties and new realities. A tattooist claims his lover's skin. A widow faces an impossible choice about her disabled son. Birds of prey stalk through dreams of environmental catastrophe. Here is family in all its beautiful,terrible complexity - the bonds that sustain us, the ones that suffocate, the love that heals and the secrets that destroy. Bold, unflinching, and impossible to ignore. Stepsisters showcases the depth and power of contemporary Irish women's writing.

A new poetry collection, at the age of 88, by a writer who first became interested in writing in the 1940s and 1950s when she met famous Irish writers Peig Sayers and Blanaid Salkeld. Over the subsequent 70 years she has fine tuned her feminist inclinations into a celebration of women who changed the world, such as Enheduanna, the first named poet in the world who laid claim to her work, the witches of Ghana, and the Cambridge women astronomers who were known as the Harvard computers.

This full-length play, in both English and Irish, is a fantasy, set in a timeless place-it could be the past or the future–which intentionally melds some present day aspects within a classical or mythical atmosphere (a mix that is consciously mirrored in the language). The English language title 'Mutagenesis' refers to the generation, usually intentional, of mutations, a title borrowed from genetic science with a healthy degree of artistic license and a nod in the direction of science fiction.

In this contemporary drama, five women go to a house party for a cosmetics sale. The women soon learn the cosmetic manufacturer has a special formula laid out for the evening, which they insist on being followed. They claim that their products have curative properties since they are based on herbs and earth energy. Dissatisfied with the formula, the women break the rules with consequences they couldn’t have imagined.

Join Neha as she travels around the world in an amazing adventure of discovery, visiting new countries, making new friends, learning about statelessness and all the while, piecing together bits of the puzzle about her own nationality.

These selected poems (in English and Irish) cover four decades of this acclaimed poet's work and explore themes including birth and women's affairs, nature, love and imagination, war, ageing and death.

Staying Thin for Daddy is the debut English-language short story collection from Brennan, one of Ireland’s leading writers in both the Irish and English languages. The book was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Collection Award.

Swimming with Pelicans / Ag Eitiilt fara Condciir is if major new dual language collection from Deirdre Brennan, one of lreland's foremost writers in both English and Irish. In this collection there are eyocations of memory, poems of war, dispossession and the removal of freedom. Landscapes hold a sense of threat and foreboding, hiding the missing, the murdered, the unbaptised. Dream landscapes feature as background to the hurt for imagination and inspiration. Old deities, Celtic, Hindu. or Mayan break' through consciousness to claim their dues;' and old, languages whisper just beyond the range of hearing. Life's transience—birth, ageing and death, including the death of children and the demolition of the old to make way for the new—is addressed in stunning sequences.

This volume combines new collections by established authors Deirdre Brennan and Máighréad Medbh with a collection by emerging author Nuala Ní Chonchúir. The diversity of their work reveals much skill and insight with astute observations—sometimes comical, sometimes sad—on the human condition and the world around us.