The Art of Reading Book Club with Colm Tóibín | Episode 10: 'The Last September' by Elizabeth Bowen

The Arts Council Podcast

The November Art of Reading book club features Laureate for Irish Fiction Colm Tóibín in conversation with writer Tom McCarthy about Elizabeth Bowen’s novel 'The Last September' The Laureate says “This is another novel set during the Irish War of Independence. Just as Martina Devlin’s book is about solitude and introspection, this centres on a house party, scenes filled with chatter and strange silences, things unmentioned and unmentionable. And in the background are the insurgents, the sense of impending doom.” Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated at the local Convent of Mercy and at University College Cork. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa in 1978/79. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, mainly working in the Lending Section of Cork Central Library before he withdrew to write fulltime in 2014. He has won many awards for his poetry, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the O’Shaughnessy Prize and the American-Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. His tenth collection of poems, Prophecy,was published by Carcanet Press in 2019. A former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review,his latest book, Memory, Poetry and the Party: Journals 1974-2014, is published by The Gallery Press, Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. An only child of Anglo-Irish descent, she was educated in England and spent her summers at Bowen’s Court in County Cork. She was a short-story writer, novelist and essayist. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled Encounters, was published in 1923 with the help of Rose Macaulay of the Bloomsbury Group. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel. Her most highly regarded and well-known novels, The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1948), were set in London between the World Wars and during the Blitz. Her novel The Last September (1929) recounts the history of Bowen’s Court and is set during the events that preceded Irish independence. She was awarded the CBE in 1948 and received an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1948 and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973. Learn more about the Art of Reading Book Club and the Laureate for Irish Fiction programme: https://www.artscouncil.ie/Arts-in-Ireland/Literature/Laureate-for-Irish-Fiction/The-Art-of-Reading-Book-Club/