DENISE GOUGH will open the Seamus Heaney Lecture 2024 at the Institute of Irish Studies in Liverpool next week.
The Wexford-born actor has been back on the boards in London of late as she reprised her Olivier Award-winning role as Emma in Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places and Things.
Gough, who was joined by Sinéad Cusack in the production at the Trafalgar Theatre over the summer, won Best Actress at the 2016 Olivier Awards and at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards for her ‘career defining performance’ as Emma in the production at the National Theatre in 2015.
Denise Gough will open the annual Seamus heaney lecture in Liverpool this weekShe has also won an Olivier for her performance in Angels in America at the National Theatre in 2018.
This month the Irishwoman will be at the University of Liverpool for the annual Seamus Heaney Lecture.
Hosted by the Institute of Irish Studies, which is based at the university, Gough will open the event, which is organised by the Institute in association with The Estate of Seamus Heaney.
The actor will recite a poem by the late Irish poet who died in 2013.
Born in Derry, Heaney’s first collection of poems, titled Death of a Naturalist, appeared in 1966.
Sinéad Cusack and Denise Gough starred in a revival of People, Places & Things in the West End over the summerHe would go on to become one of the leading poets of his generation and In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.
Professor Clair Wills will give the 2024 lecture, titled ‘A cobble thrown a hundred years ago’ in which she will “be thinking about public and private homes and forms of family inheritance”, the Institute confirmed this week.
“She will be asking how should we approach the aftermath of the scandals of institutional abuse in Ireland?” they add, and “what questions should we be asking about guilt, blame and responsibility?”
A critic and cultural historian, Professor Wills is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain.
The book won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
The Seamus Heaney Lecture 2024 takes place at 6pm on Thursday, November 21.
It is free to attend but tickets must be booked here.