In Conversation: A Talkback with Marina Carr and Catherine Hollis

Marina Carr’s plays to date are Ullaloo (1989), Low in the Dark (1991), The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), By the Bog of Cats (1998), On Raftery’s Hill (1999), Ariel (2000), Woman and Scarecrow (2004), The Cordelia Dream (2006), Marble (2007), and 16 Possible Glimpses (2009). Her two plays for children are Meat and Salt (2003) and The Giant Blue Hand (2004). The RSC produced the world premiere of her reimagining of Hecuba at the Swan Theatre in September 2015, and in August 2015, the Abbey Theatre produced a major revival of By the Bog of Cats. Her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months in the Abbey Theatre’s main house, finishing at the end of January 2017. 

Her work has been produced by the Abbey Theatre, the Gate, Druid, the Royal Court, Wyndhams Theatre, the RSC, the Tricycle, the MacCarter Theatre, San Diego Rep and Milwaukee Rep, and has been translated into many languages and produced around the world. She also wrote a new, contemporary translation of Rigoletto for Opera Theatre Company, which toured Ireland in 2015, and wrote an original oratorio as part of a commission for Wicklow County Council that brought together choirs from throughout County Wicklow with solo singers and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in November 2016. 

Prizes include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, American/Ireland Fund Award, E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Macaulay Fellowship, Puterbaugh Fellowship and the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in 2017, conferred that September at an international literary festival at Yale. She is also member of Aosdána.

She has taught at Trinity, Villanova, and Princeton. Currently she lectures in the English department at Dublin City University. She is published by the Gallery Press, Nick Hern Books, and Faber & Faber.

Catherine W. Hollis teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s Fall Program for Freshmen. She is a co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature (2021) and recently guest edited a special issue of The Virginia Woolf Miscellany on book collecting. She is the historian-bibliographer (2021-2023) of the International Virginia Woolf Society, and is the author of Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer (Cecil Woolf, 2010). Her recent essays on women in the milieu of anarchist Emma Goldman are included in Thanks For Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History (ed. Dresvina, 2021) and Women Making Modernism (ed. Delsandro, 2020).