The Gallery Press: Poetry & Drama from Ireland

02/10/2026

October 2nd

Brian Friel and Derek Mahon

Today, on the anniversary of their deaths, in 2015 and 2020 respectively, we think of two revered authors and beloved friends whose plays and poems and prose it has been our privilege to publish for almost half a century. How lucky we were to have the work of such artists entrusted to us. We should like their families and loved ones to remember that we are thinking of them.

30/09/2026

Ballybeg Goes Global
A Celebration of Brian Friel

Friday, 2 October 2026 | 2.00pm - 8.00pm
National Library of Ireland, Dublin, D02 P638
Booked out.

Marking the 11th anniversary of Friel's death, the second annual event will feature international experts discussing his work alongside unique performances that reveal how his work has travelled and been translated into different languages, cultures and theatrical traditions.

This is a celebration of Brian Friel's work housed in the National Library. Scholars and performers from across the globe will join in an exploration of how one of Ireland's greatest playwrights continues to inspire audiences around the world.

A Celebration of Brian Friel

30/09/2026

A lovely literary event is coming up at Prim’s Bookshop, Kinsale as part of the Kinsale Literary Festival, Words by Water on Sunday 4 October at 11am, with three Cork writers: Jennifer Horgan, Eamon O’Leary and Molly Twomey.

Jennifer Horgan's debut collection Care was published in 2025, while Eamon O'Leary is the author of I’m a Big Boy Now.

Molly Twomey is the author of Raised Among Vultures (winner of the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award) and Chic to be Sad (shortlisted for the Farmgate National Poetry Award).

11 am, Sunday 4 October at Prim's Bookshop: Bibliotherapy 📚
Tickets: €10.00
https://www.wordsbywater.ie/event/local-voices-3/ -tickets__tickets-form

28/09/2026

To celebrate their anniversary year, Lyric Belfast are publishing a special edition anthology of Threshold, the Lyric and Northern Ireland’s premier 20th century cultural and literary periodical which ran between 1957 and 1990.

Today they're spotlighting Belfast-born poet, critic and academic, Gerald Dawe. 🔦

Dawe was a Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin, with visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University. He published thirteen collections of poetry, most recently Another Time: Poems 1978-2023 (Gallery Press), and edited The Younger Irish Poets anthology (Blackstaff Press, 1982). He was the 28th recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry. ✨️

Dawe co-edited the Winter issue of Threshold with John Boyd in 1983. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Dawe contributed to the journal with essays on contemporary literature and poems. ‘Names’, published in Threshold, featured in Dawe's first collection of poetry, and can be found in the new anthology:

‘They call this “Black North”
black from the heart out -
It doesn’t matter about
particularities when mouths
mumble the handy sayings
and day-in minds tighten.’

https://lyrictheatre.co.uk/threshold

26/09/2026

The Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival, commemorating the late poet, will take place in his hometown of Newcastle West, Co. Limerick from Thursday 1st to Sunday 4th October, 2026.

The presentation of the Michael Hartnett Award 2026 to joint winners, Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Hymn to All the Restless Girls) and Pat Boran (Hedge School), will take place at 11am in The Red Door Gallery on Friday, 2 October.

The festival programme also includes the Michael Hartnett Memorial Lecture, Donal Ryan, Haiku Heaven, the Éigse Slam, a gala screening of Baite, and live music from Lisa Hannigan, Paul Noonan and Gemma Hayes, among many other events.

A fantastic weekend of poetry, literature, music and the arts in Newcastle West.

https://www.limerick.ie/discover/whats-on/festivals/eigse-michael-hartnett-literary-arts-festival

25/09/2026

Our thanks to everyone who came along to the launch of our three new titles by Kevin Graham (Daylight Mystery), John Banville (The Gold Standard) and Peter Sirr (Standing in the Rain) in association with Notre Dame Dublin. With readings and signings (and refreshments) it was an evening of joy and celebration.

24/09/2026

📚 Published today

‘Money is the root of all happiness.’

So begins John Banville’s The Gold Standard, an expansive drama centred on John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas transformed government and finance.

But the play comes most vividly to life in the tangled lives of Keynes and his Bloomsbury circle: his relationships with Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey, and his marriage to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, whose arrival provoked the snobbery and hostility of Virginia Woolf and others. At its heart is a drama of outsiders and insiders, and of the meanness directed towards one who takes ‘one of their own’.

Spanning two world wars, The Gold Standard traces the rise of Keynesian economics alongside the decline of England as the world’s financial superpower.

Available soon in all good bookshops or from The Gallery Press:
https://gallerypress.com/product/the-gold-standard/

24/09/2026

We’re delighted to publish Daylight Mystery, the third poetry collection by Kevin Graham — a collection that has already received some wonderful recognition.

The book includes ‘Aspiration’, winner of the 2025 London Magazine Poetry Prize. Judge Fiona Benson praised its 'exquisite phrasing and music' and said: 'I found myself holding my breath every time I read it.'

Across the collection, Kevin’s poems move between the natural world, memory, history and the everyday, finding strangeness and beauty in unexpected places — from lawnmowers clearing their throats over back gardens to the London Underground appearing in the flow map of an MRI scan.

There are conversations here with Edward Thomas, Oscar Wilde and John Clare, but above all there is a distinctive poetic voice: alert, questioning and wonderfully attentive to the world.

Daylight Mystery confirms Kevin Graham’s emergence as one of our finest new poets.

Available soon in all good bookshops or online from The Gallery Press
https://gallerypress.com/product/daylight-mystery/

24/09/2026

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Standing in the Rain (Essays on Poetry) by Peter Sirr.

From the lyrics of Sappho and the hard-won wisdom of the Tang masters to major European figures and the distinctive voices of Irish poets (Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) these essays explore the ‘creative restlessness’ of poets and their ‘unflinching attention’ to the ‘permanent, amplified crisis’ of our times. The book also examines poetry’s role in confronting violence and conflict as it offers ‘moral witness’.

Available soon in all good bookshops or from The Gallery Press:
https://gallerypress.com/product/standing-in-the-rain/