Preparations for September’s Shaking Bog festival are now in full swing and – the usual health restrictions allowing – we hope to welcome many of you to the valley for an exhilarating array of readings, performances, walks and talks across a busy weekend.
We are quite humbled by the quality of the guests that we will be able to welcome here for the festival and look forward to sharing details over the coming weeks and the full programme in early August. We sense a real hunger from our guests and audience alike to escape from the virtual world of the last year and emerge into the light of nature and real experience. It has been a year of planning, sometimes more in hope than expectation but, thankfully, hope has won out…
More soon…
Many of the friends of the festival have been beavering away throughout lockdown: the brilliant John Lewis-Stempel has another new book out that tells the intimate biography of an English farm in Woodston; we’re delighted too that the inspirational advocate for bug life in general Collie Ennis has moved to Wicklow - welcome Collie; the fine Dara McAnulty has been announced as a columnist for the Irish Times; and - best of all - Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (author of one of the books of the year Thin Places, recently long-listed for the Wainwright Prize) has had a bonny baby boy, Aenghus Ruadh. Any newborn is a sort of miracle but anyone who has read this heart-breaking and brilliant book will realise how truly wonderful this news is.. Congratulations Kerri