Island festival with a focus on culture and conversation
Guests at this year’s Inish Festival include composer Trevor Jones – whose credits include The Last of the Mohicans, Mississippi Burning, In the Name of the Father and Notting Hill – and Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo, whose collection, Measures of Expatriation, won the 2016 Forward Prize.
The third Inish: Island Conversations 2017 will take place on Inishbofin from June 1-4 and offers an eclectic mix of music, writers, films and discussions.
It’s programmed by Peadar King, a Bofin man, who now runs the Black Gate Cultural Centre in Galway City.
Participants include writer and former BBC journalist Sam Miller whose acclaimed memoir Fathers, explores what it was like to have ‘two fathers’.
Karl Miller, the man who reared Sam, was a literary editor and co-founder of the London Review of Books. He and his wife Jane had three children, including Sam. However, in 1977 when Sam was 16 Jane informed him that his real father was Londoner Tony White, a long-time Connemara resident with whom she’d had an affair. White, who had introduced poet Richard Murphy to Inishbofin, had died the previous year, while in his 40s.
Fathers explores Sam Miller’s background and those of the two men who helped shaped him. He will read from the book on Friday, June 2, at Inish. And given Tony White’s long connection with Inishbofin and Connemara – he’s buried on Omey Island – this will be of special interest.
Earlier that day, Galway based academic and writer Jackie Uí Chionna will read from Máirtín Mór: He was Galway, her biography of politician and businessman Máirtín Mór McDonogh. She will also discuss his influence on Galway during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.