6 – Eleanor Hooker

Welcome to Day 6 of our West Cork Literary Festival Advent Calendar. Our author today is Eleanor Hooker.

Eleanor Hooker’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) was published in October 2021. Her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Netherlands) was published in July 2021. Her chapbook traces (Salvage Press) and her Markievicz Award collection Where Memory Lies (Ponce Press) are forthcoming. Eleanor is working on a novel. Her poetry has been published in Ireland and internationally: in the UK; USA; Germany; Holland; Poland; Romania; India; Hungary and Australia, and in literary journals internationally, including: Poetry Ireland Review; PN Review; Poetry Review; Agenda; POETRY magazine; Winter Papers; The Stinging Fly; Banshee; The Irish Times and The Blue Nib. Her poems have been anthologised, most recently in Divining Dante (Recent Work Press). Her poems have been broadcast on RTÉ and have been translated into Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Dutch. Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University, UK. She is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS). She’s a helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as an Intensive Care Nurse and trained as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin. www.eleanorhooker.com

Eleanor is reading an extract from Of Ochre And Ash which was published by Dedalus Press in October 2021. Today’s video unlocked on 6th December 2021 and may be viewed below. Closed caption subtitles are available and may be turned on or off. Click on “youtube” or “full screen” icon in the video to watch it in full screen or visit youtube here.

About our WCLF Literary Advent Calendar

2021 was another wonderful year for Irish writing and so many incredible books by Irish authors and authors living in Ireland were released this year. Even though festivals returned in-person and online not every author had the opportunity to launch their books with a public celebration or to engage with audiences in the “usual” way. We’re delighted to bring you a small selection of these authors and we’ve invited twenty-four writers to submit a short video reading from their new books. Our selection is an attempt to show the wide range of Irish writing and in particular to focus on writers whose books we feel deserve more attention and those who were not previously featured in WCLF 2021 events. We hope that you will enjoy the chance to hear these writers reading their own work and to discover some new books for your reading piles.