Alumni
Alumni update sscanlon
University of West London Alumni e-Newsletter Autumn Edition
Alumni Update: Seamus Scanlon (Class of '05)
Seamus Scanlon is a graduate of the Master in Library and Information Studies program at University of West London. In December 09 in New York he won a prestigious Carnegie Corporation/New York Times ‘I Love My Librarian’ award and we featured a short profile of his as a result in our subsequent e-newsletter.
He was a 2009 New Irish Writing nominee and he won the 2010 Over The Edge New Writer Award in September. He received an MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York in 2007 where he won awards for fiction and drama including for the play 'Dancing at Lunacy'. Here Seamus shares some of the reasons behind his writing.
I write because I’m from Ireland, where it’s expected, where we can’t stop talking and writing, and talking about writing. The grey low lying clouds makes us crowd into pubs to swop stories and embroider them and turns us soulful, serious, sorrowful.
I write because centuries-old High Crosses and the hollow casks of broken castles endure through the long damp winters, and Holy wells have magic properties, and tens of thousands climb Croagh Patrick every year as the pagans did before them. Because we believe in Fairies and nature spirits, the hungry grass and the Children of Lir turned forever into white swans.
I write because I’m from Galway, where I walked every school day through Bowling Green, pass the home of Nora Barnacle, where Michael Bodkin waited for his girl, as the cold rain slanted in on Atlantic breezes from Galway Bay, across the Claddagh, across Salthill and sought out the grey cramped streets of Galway City.
Her beau dying of consumption – buried in Rahoon cemetery high above the City, consumed he was by the light that was Nora Barnacle, the same light that Joyce saw. Joyce consumed by Nora Barnacle and the language of the invader that he forged into something new and miraculous, a literary blade that cut through the English language.
Alumni Update: Seamus Scanlon (Class of '05)
Seamus Scanlon is a graduate of the Master in Library and Information Studies program at University of West London. In December 09 in New York he won a prestigious Carnegie Corporation/New York Times ‘I Love My Librarian’ award and we featured a short profile of his as a result in our subsequent e-newsletter.
He was a 2009 New Irish Writing nominee and he won the 2010 Over The Edge New Writer Award in September. He received an MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York in 2007 where he won awards for fiction and drama including for the play 'Dancing at Lunacy'. Here Seamus shares some of the reasons behind his writing.
I write because I’m from Ireland, where it’s expected, where we can’t stop talking and writing, and talking about writing. The grey low lying clouds makes us crowd into pubs to swop stories and embroider them and turns us soulful, serious, sorrowful.
I write because centuries-old High Crosses and the hollow casks of broken castles endure through the long damp winters, and Holy wells have magic properties, and tens of thousands climb Croagh Patrick every year as the pagans did before them. Because we believe in Fairies and nature spirits, the hungry grass and the Children of Lir turned forever into white swans.
I write because I’m from Galway, where I walked every school day through Bowling Green, pass the home of Nora Barnacle, where Michael Bodkin waited for his girl, as the cold rain slanted in on Atlantic breezes from Galway Bay, across the Claddagh, across Salthill and sought out the grey cramped streets of Galway City.
Her beau dying of consumption – buried in Rahoon cemetery high above the City, consumed he was by the light that was Nora Barnacle, the same light that Joyce saw. Joyce consumed by Nora Barnacle and the language of the invader that he forged into something new and miraculous, a literary blade that cut through the English language.
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