Join writer Belinda McKeon and poet Leeanne Quinn for an in conversation exploring Quinn’s recently published collection of poetry Landscape with Question.
Through a series of intricately patterned ‘landscape’ poems, the east coast of Ireland and the medieval town of Drogheda are set against and alongside the central European city of Vienna and the banks of the River Danube as the real and imagined align and ask questions of each other. What is present beneath the surface of a city? What trace of time does a river or sea still hold?
Landscape with Question is the first creative work to extensively engage with one of Ireland’s leading Modernist artists, Nano Reid. The temporal and geographic layers of Reid’s paintings, the complex psychological interiority of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, the movements of tides and the pattern of human and animal life in urban landscapes all serve as constellations for the speaker of this pan-European quest narrative by award-winning Irish poet Leeanne Quinn.
Tickets: €10
Date: Sun Sept 6
Time: 1pm – 2pm (doors 12:45pm)
Venue: Highlanes Gallery
Leeanne Quinn
Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection of poetry, Before You (Dedalus Press, 2012), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives (Dedalus Press, 2020), was noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus Press, 2022) and is the editor of Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025).
Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916, Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry, and Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Originally from Drogheda and Monasterboice, Co. Louth, she has lived in Germany, Austria, and is now based in Limerick, Ireland.
Belinda McKeon
Belinda McKeon is a novelist. Her first novel, Solace (Picador, 2011) won the Faber Prize and was named Irish Book of the Year. She is also the author of Tender (2015) and the editor of the collection A Kind of Compass. She curated Poetry Now, Ireland’s largest festival, for five years, and was the co-founder of the Irish Arts Center PoetryFest in New York. She now directs the MA in Creative Writing at Maynooth University and lives in Co. Louth.