7pm, 8 December 2024
MoLI, UCD Naughton Joyce Centre, Newman House,
86 St Stephen’s Green South, Dublin 2
A music and storytelling event to launch the new collection of Irish Christmas ghost stories from MoLI Editions and UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics, A Visit from the Banshee: Irish Ghost Stories & Supernatural Tales, edited by Katie Mishler
This Christmas, MoLI invites you to step into a world of eerie hauntings and restless spirits with a chilling collection of spectral stories and a ghost storytelling event.
To launch the collection A Visit from the Banshee, actors Nuala Hayes and Demi Isaac Oviawe, and musician Seán Mac Erlaine will present four ghost stories hailing from the Traveller community, the Irish-Nigerian community, Irish folklore and Victorian literature in the depths of Dublin’s midwinter.
The Christmas ghost story was made famous by Charles Dickens in Victorian England. Now, digital humanities researchers have unearthed an Irish Christmas ghost story tradition that had all but vanished from view. The British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, recently made available online through a collaboration between the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, is now searchable and scholars are finding Irish writers of Christmas ghost stories whose works have been buried by time.
These recovered stories are collected together in A Visit from the Banshee. From the terrifying tales of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Bowen and Charlotte Riddell to fresh and unsettling contributions from contemporary writers such as Oein DeBhairduin, Melatu Uche Okorie and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the contents of this collection explores the dark corners where life and death collide. Whether it’s a banshee’s wail or the ghost of a lost love, each story explores the haunting aftermath of betrayal, the ache of separation and the pain of unhealed wounds.
Gather your loved ones, dim the lights and prepare to be drawn into a world where the supernatural confronts you at every turn. The book will be available at the launch on 8 December, and then at MoLI’s gift shop.
Tickets and preorders at: www.moli.ie/banshee
Subsequent broadcast at: radio.moli.ie
QUOTES:
‘In the tradition of the best ghost stories, these are haunting and genuinely chilling tales, rich with the atmosphere of a dark, candle-lit night, in which a supernatural being might tap at the window, follow us down the street, or stir in the shadows. In A Visit from the Banshee, some of the best storytellers of Ireland gather together, whisper in our ears, and threaten to unsettle the fragile certainties of life.’
-Seán Hewitt
‘A collection to warm the heart and chill the bone.’
-John Connolly
‘A deeply considered and exquisitely curated compendium of chilling, tense stories that come roaring from the depths of our history and racing out of our present, A Visit From The Banshee is a torch to gather round in the winter.’
-Sara Maria Griffin
ENDS
Publication Information
Imprint MoLI Editions
ISBN 978-1-0369-0396-1
RRP €XXX
228 pages
Book Orders www.moli.ie/shop
About MoLI – Museum of Literature Ireland
The museum is a partnership between University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland, open 7 days per week and is located in the original home of UCD on St Stephen’s Green, amidst spectacular historic buildings and gardens. MoLI celebrates Ireland’s internationally-renowned literary culture and heritage from the past to the present, inspiring the next generation to create, read and write.
Alongside its exhibitions, commissions and monthly late night openings, the museum has developed learning programmes that reach from local community groups to online creative writing programmes broadcast to schools across the country, and most recently was the winner of a major European Commission Award – the Europa Nostra Grand Prix – for its work in opening up the literary art form to diverse audiences.
About the VICTEUR project
VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture is a 5-year project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 884951). The project focuses on the long history of migration and dynamic cultural exchange. It brings together researchers from UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, who have created a new searchable digital platform (Curatr) for the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus. Using this unique resource, scholars are finding Irish writers of Christmas ghost stories whose works have been buried by time. https://projectvicteur.com/
About the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics
The Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics is one of Europe’s largest data analytics research organisations, with over 450 researchers, more than 80 industry partners and €150+ million in funding. Its research spans Fundamentals of Data Science, Sensing and Actuation, Scaling Algorithms, Model Building, Multi-Modal Analysis, Data Engineering and Governance, Decision Making and Trustworthy AI. Insight is made up of four host institutions at DCU, University of Galway, UCC and UCD. Insight’s partner sites are Maynooth University, Tyndall, TCD and UL. www.insight-centre.org
