Festival’s First Thought Talks return to NUIG for Winter run
The new Winter First Thought Talks discussion series from Galway International Arts Festival will be held at NUIG’s Aula Maxima on November 30 and December 1.
It will feature City of Thorns author Ben Rawlence, Madam Politician author Martina Fitzgerald, former politician Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Labour Party TD Jan O’Sullivan and Irish Times journalist Fintan O’Toole.
Fintan O’Toole’s talk, titled A New and Frightening Home? will open the series. It’s on Friday, November 30, at 8pm and will be introduced by Catriona Crowe, Curator of First Thoughts.
O’Toole will discuss his new book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, a dissection of the psychology and politics of Brexit.
It explores how trivial journalistic lies became national obsessions; how indifference to truth and historical fact came to define the style of a political elite; how a former colonial power was redefined as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism.
City of Thorns, Home in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, a discussion between Ben Rawlence and photographer Sarah Hickson, will take place on Saturday, December 1, at 11.30am.
Author and human rights activist Rawlence spent four years living and working in Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee Camp, the world’s largest. Originally established in 1992 to house 90,000 refugees from that country’s civil war, it’s now home to some 350,000 people His book of the same title offers an in-depth insight into the ever-growing issue of people being displaced by wars and climate-change.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
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