Guests of the Nation: Kevin Barry on adapting Frank O'Connor's classic tale  

The Limerick-born writer has teamed up with Corcadorca and Mel Mercier for an innovative production of the wartime story 

Kevin Barry has helped adapt Guests Of The Nation for Cork Midsummer Festival. 

When Kevin Barry needs a break from the scribing, he gets up from his desk, grabs a hurley and goes outside to beat a sliothar against the shed wall. He doesn’t say if he dons a jersey for the session, but if he did, he’d have no shortage of options.

The green of Limerick, the city where he was born in 1969, is the obvious choice. But then again, Barry spent plenty of formative years in Cork from the early 1990s, and it’s a place he constantly goes back to in his books. Or he might even opt for Sligo, as it’s in the southern part of the Yeats County that he’s made his home in an old RIC barracks since 2006.