Marian Keyes

Because positive equality measures that happen can be easily taken back.

So equality and diversity are things that need to be constantly... platformed and named and then as I said I'll finish Ireland House after 400 books I'd love to say I'm finished I'm retiring I'm going to the Bahamas I'm not I have many many plans and I'll be continuing publishing debut poetry collections established writers short story collections, literary fiction, literary criticism, and one of the books that will be happening later this year, hopefully in this building, with the extraordinary talent that is Marian Keyes, who is here with us.

And Marian Keyes was the founding librarian of the lexicon.

And Marian has done brilliant work on this writer called Sheila Fitzgerald, Hungarian Rhapsody that was published in 1934 under a pseudonym, a South Dublin woman who at the age of, I think, 33, had published three novels and had two plays in the Abbey Theatre.

and is completely forgotten about.

hosted by me,

writer and broadcaster Sam Baker.

You know how it is, you can be swimming along nicely and then

all of a sudden everything you thought you had, gone.

I was too slow in booking it.

And then my friend Sarah said, she was like, well, what about Paris? You know, that there's the Irish cultural center.

They do residencies for Irish writers.

You know, you could go there for a month.

Well-

You're the new Marian Keyes.

[laughs]

Ma- well, yeah.

I had, I had written a book before, but it took me four years to finish it and I said, "I'm never doing this again.

It's too hard." Um, and but then January 2021 came along and there was this, uh, a four-week online, um, free, um, kind of a workshop with Marian Keyes.

Mm-hmm.

Um, initiative of the libraries actually, and my dear friend Stephanie sent me the link and she said, "Just, just, just log on and see what it's about." So I did, and at the end of the session, Marian, uh, uh, you know, uh, challenged everybody to write 500 words and she'd get them a little theme or a, a little headline or some sort of a, a, a quote to inspire them.

This is an Irish independent production.

[gentle music] You'll find it in books like mine, books like Marian Keyes, books like Cathy Kelly's.

Books about women often contain sex scenes because our lives contain sex scenes-

Mm

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe that's something the bookshops could look into.

But oftentimes you'll find it in books like mine, books like Marian Keyes, books like Cathy Kelly's.

Books about women often contain sex scenes because our lives contain sex scenes-