Christodoulos Makris

I'm very pleased to be curating the closing event of the European Poetry Festival 2022 in partnership with festival director SJ Fowler. 'The European Camarade: Ireland' takes place at Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, on Saturday 9 July 2022. My involvement with the festival - in a co-producing and programming role - began with the closing event of the 2019 edition , which I was able to produce in the context of my spell as Writer in Residence at Maynooth University & Kildare County Council Library and Arts Service (2018-19). Plans for follow-up events were undermined by the pandemic, but we are now in a position to resume this multi-body partnership with an event offering a unique approach to multi-genre, cross-border and collaborative poetics, and representing a significant legacy of my writing residency in Co Kildare. The European Poetry Festival is a predominantly UK-based festival celebrating the resurgence of avant-garde and literary poetry across E

The Summer 2022 issue of The Stinging Fly  is dedicated entirely to poetry - a first for the long-standing magazine. The issue is edited by poetry editor Cal Doyle, and I'm pleased to have a specially commissioned essay in it. The Stinging Fly is  "a literary magazine, a book publisher, an education provider, and an online platform" operating from Dublin. The magazine is at the heart of the organisation; it was founded in 1997 by Aoife Kavanagh and Declan Meade, with the first issue appearing in March 1998. It continues to publish two issues every year, offering a mix of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Declan Meade remains as the publisher and chief executive of The Stinging Fly , while its magazine editors have included Thomas Morris, Sally Rooney and Danny Denton. The Poetry Issue (Issue 46 / Vol 2) is a 240-page volume containing poems in English and Irish, essays on poetry and poetics, discussion-based oral histories, and interviews, featuring the work of many excel