THE annual Desmond O’Grady memorial reading will be held at the People’s Museum of Limerick in Pery Square on Wednesday evening as part of the ‘April is Poetry Month in Limerick’ poetry festival.
Poets Adam Wyeth, Vivienne McKechnie and Kieran Beville will be guest readers at the event.
Adam Wyeth is also the judge for the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition and he will announce the winner of this year’s competition after the reading which gets under way at 7pm.
The annual event commemorates the life and literary legacy of Desmond O’Grady who was born in Limerick in August 1935. He moved to Paris in the 1950s and worked in the Shakespeare and Company bookshop before he began teaching in the city. He also taught and wrote in Rome and America.
He met Federico Fellini during his time in Italy and played the role of an Irish poet in Fellini’s film’ La Dolce Vita’.
He was a teaching fellow at Harvard University where he completed his MA and Ph.D. He taught at the American University in Cairo and the University of Alexandria in Egypt.
The Limerick poet was a founder member of the European Community of Writers, and was the European editor of The Transatlantic Review.
Collections of his poems include The Road Taken: Poems 1956-1996 and The Wandering Celt. He also published 12 collections of translated poetry, including Kurdish Poems of Love and Liberty in 2005.
