Kinsale Arts: Alannah Hopkin recalls the humble beginnings of the festival back in 1987
Alannah Hopkin has lived in her mother's hometown of Kinsale since 1982.
The Kinsale Arts Festival wasn’t so much founded, Alannah Hopkin says, as it just happened, despite misgivings whether people would sit in a pub and listen to poetry.
“The initial plan, back in 1987, was to have a poetry reading in the Fisherman’s Hall, but on the night a key couldn’t be found, and the event had to be moved to the Armada Bar instead.
“And that turned out to be the making of the festival. Everyone, it turned out, would stay quiet and listen to someone reading poems in a pub.”
That first festival featured readings by locals Desmond O’Grady, Derek Mahon, and Aidan Higgins, and by visiting poets Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Sean Lucy, and it grew from what Hopkin says was “just a group of friends seeing what they could do.” She recalls their biggest coup when, in 1988, Desmond O’Grady promised he would get Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky to come and read.
“Brodsky had just been made Nobel laureate, and we all said ‘Oh yes, sure, Desmond’, and he damn well did,” she remembers. “Brodsky read in the Trident Hotel, and he nearly lifted the roof off. It was an amazing evening.”
London-born Hopkin moved in 1982 to her mother’s hometown of Kinsale. “I’ve lived here now longer than I lived in London,” she says.
Four years later, she was working on a book about St Patrick, and supplementing her income by reviewing books. She writes in her critically acclaimed A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins: “I was glad not to be in love, to be footloose and fancy-free, captain of my own ship”.
It was then her friend, poet Derek Mahon, introduced her to his friend, novelist Aidan Higgins, and the thunderbolt struck.
Hopkin was 36, and Higgins 59, but she says he could have passed for 39. They moved in together almost immediately, and 11 years later, they married. They were together until Higgins’ death in 2015, with Hopkin caring for him as his memory faded through his final years.
A Very Strange Man tells the story of their time together, and John Banville’s glowing review is quoted on the back cover (“a fond, honest and deeply fascinating memoir of … a major figure in Irish writing in the 20th century”).
Aidan Higgins is often considered a stylistic heir to James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, as Hopkin writes: “a risk-taker, learned, jocular, bawdy, ironic, disdainful, unpredictable … [making] up his own rules as a writer as he went along”.
During their time together, Hopkin took journalistic work to allow Higgins to work on fiction and memoirs. Now, she has written A Very Strange Man, in part from a desire to bring Higgins’ work to a new audience, and, as she puts it modestly, “the reviews have been very generous”.
She feels the book has struck a chord with people: “They recognise the life, and the anxieties about money, and if you’re asked can you do something, you always say ‘Yes’ and then think about it afterward.”
When asked the vulgar question of how sales are going, she responds with delicate wit: “Well, it came out when the bookshops were closed, so I would say it’s picking up nicely.”
No longer involved in organising Kinsale’s arts festival, Alannah Hopkin wishes it well, saying that although it has changed “terrifically” since 1987, it has always been a labour of love for the town, and she looks forward to her own personal highlights: the live gallery, with Kinsale’s shop windows hosting art exhibitions, and John Spillane’s performance.
- A Very Strange Man, a live Q&A with Alannah Hopkin, takes place at 3pm on Saturday 10 July at the Tap Tavern, Kinsale.
The Kinsale Arts Weekend runs from July 8 to 11, and its theme is “The Year the World Changed”, from the David Attenborough documentary exploring the positive effects of lockdown upon nature.
Highlights will include live performances from John Spillane, Lorraine Nash, Paddy Dennehy, Jack O’Rourke, Marian Cassidy, and Emmet O’Connor.
Kinsale’s shop windows and traditional galleries will display works by local and national artists.
Irish National Opera will present an outdoor screening of The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies at the Bowling Green.
For further information, visit www.kinsaleartsweekend.com
