Compass Lines: A North/South Writers’ Exchange

Compass Lines: A Writers’ Exchange Project

Compass Lines is a writers’ exchange project aiming to establish links between writers and communities in the North and South of Ireland, while additionally examining relationships between the East and West of these islands, through workshops, public discussions, and the commissioning of new collaborative writing.

Compass Lines aims to encourage artistic fusion and integrate a sometimes fragmented audience, geographically and otherwise, through the strategy of combining writers with various concerns and backgrounds. Eschewing their comfort zones and usual patterns of working presents a diversion and a challenge to the writers, and a way of instigating discussions about ideas of process and place that reside in contemporary writing and which are often ignored through traditional views of literature.

Developed by poet, editor and curator Christodoulos Makris in collaboration with the Irish Writers Centre as producing organisation, and with the participation of the Crescent Arts Centre as partner venue, Compass Lines will comprise a series of enterprises, alternately in Dublin and in Belfast, each with the participation of two writers – one with connections to the north of Ireland and one to the south.

Karl Whitney (gorse no. 1) is a writer of non-fiction whose first book, Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin was published by Penguin in 2014. In 2013 he received the John Heygate award for travel writing. He has a BA in English and History from University College Dublin, an MA in Modernism from University of East Anglia, and a PhD in History from University College Dublin. He is a Research Associate at the UCD Humanities Institute.

Philip Terry (gorse no. 4) is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex. Among his books are the lipogrammatic novel The Book of Bachelors, the edited story collection Ovid Metamorphosed, a translation of Raymond Queneau’s last book of poems Elementary Morality, and the poetry volumes Oulipoems, Oulipoems 2, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Advanced Immorality. His novel tapestry was shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmith’s Prize. Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s action to current day Essex, was published in 2014, as well as a translation of Georges Perec’s I Remember.

Christodoulos Makris is a poet, editor and independent curator. His work has appeared widely in Irish and international journals and anthologies, and he performed in many venues and festivals including the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. His most recent book The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press, 2015) was chosen as a poetry book of the year by RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine. He is the poetry editor of gorse, and co-edited the bilingual exchange anthology Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry of Guadalajara and Dublin (EBL-Cielo Abierto / CONACULTA, 2014). In 2014 he produced and co-curated the transnational poetry collaborations project and tour Yes But Are We Enemies which involved more than 40 contemporary poets from Ireland and Britain. Other curatorial projects include cross-stream: ways of writing (with Fingal Libraries) and Phonica, an independent poetry and music venture with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental.

Wednesday 2 March 2016, Irish Writers Centre, Dublin
7.30pm, entry via Eventbrite €8/€6 or on the door €10/€8
Includes a complimentary glass of wine.