This Elizabeth Bowen birthday lecture is in support of the English Creates Campaign for the English Degree.
Eibhear Walshe is the Director of Creative Writing and a senior lecturer in the School of Modern English at University College Cork. His biography Kate O’Brien A Writing Life was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006 and he edited Elizabeth Bowen: Visions and Revisions for Irish Academic Press in 2008.
In this birthday lecture, Eibhear discusses his experience of fictionalising the life of Elizabeth Bowen in his 2020 novel, The Last Day at Bowen’s Court, and looks at the way his creative process was helped by his research on Bowen and Ireland and the letters between Bowen and Charles Ritchie. The ways in which fiction can transcend the limits of biography is at the centre of his interest.
