IAC Commissions: Eimear McBride and Kevin Barry

“Barry’s language drags you into a strange, darkly lyrical world.”—Paris Review

Kevin Barry is the author most recently of the novel Night Boat To Tangier, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year for 2019. His third collection of stories, That Old Country Music, will be published in the US in January 2021. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize, and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and as a screenwriter. He lives in County Sligo, Ireland.

“Blazingly daring … [McBride’s] work is a visceral throb … [Her] language plunges us into the center of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital.”—The New Yorker

Eimear McBride is the author of three novels: Strange Hotel, The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. She is the recipient of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. She lives in London.

Photo credit: Sophie Bassouls

Dean Cappello is an experienced leader in podcasting, broadcasting, and live event programming. In 2019, he founded Gobsmack Studios to produce independent projects across media and help other companies launch. For 21 years, Cappello led the content division of WNYC/New York Public Radio and WNYC Studios, and launched Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, 2 Dope Queens, the New Yorker Radio Hour, On the Media, Death, Sex & Money, and Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, among others. His team earned 9 Peabody Awards during his tenure.

The pandemic has forced humanity into an involuntary state of uncertainty that may last a long time. This is troubling, of course, but, as with any of life’s terribly sad moments, is not without redemptive possibility. We are challenged to find a new comfort level with uncertainty as a more constant companion. 

Like everyone, we at Irish Arts Center are entering a new phase of grappling with all of this. We still don’t know when it will be safe or allowable to gather in groups for live performing arts experiences. We continue to innovate our digital programming and prepare for our magnificent new building that awaits us, soon enough we hope. We develop scenarios and contingency plans. 

And we challenge ourselves to lean into the moment. For this, as ever, we rely on the artists. 

To that end, we have commissioned more than two dozen artists reflecting a range of perspectives across our artistic community, to create short works that respond to the idea of finding grace in uncertainty, to find meaning in the chaos, and perhaps even some redemption, as we recognize the fear and sadness we feel. 

In his work On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic just weeks after 9/11, John Adams sought to create a “memory space” for those who suffered loss of life, of loved ones, of innocence, and to evoke the feeling “that we are all united by a common bond of humanity.” 

In a similar spirit, we wish to inspire a volume of artistic responses that might form a kind of tapestry of emotion, a chronicle of the moment, work that can be appreciated now and for the long-term.

The common bond of humanity unites these artists—and will carry us all through this moment.