The Centre for Irish Studies is delighted to invite you to a performance and discussion with William Keohane, which will take place at Kampus Hybernská (E.-1, Hybernská 998/4, 110 00 Praha – Nové Město) on Monday 31 March at 19:00.
William Keohane is a writer from Limerick, Ireland. His essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and British GQ Magazine, among others. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Queering the Green, an anthology of post-2000 queer Irish poetry, and RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany programme. In 2021, he was longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing, received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and was one of ten poets selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. Boxing Day, a poetry performance, toured internationally in 2023 and was nominated for an award at the Dublin Fringe Festival. William holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick. He is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University Belfast, funded through a Northern Bridge Scholarship from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Boxing Day is a series of box-shaped poems exploring transition, confinement, and time. There are 52 poems. One for each week of the year. As a staged performance, Boxing Day is a year of a life, condensed into an hour of time. Each performance is different. Between readings, the work is revised. A portion of the text is erased, and new poems are written, so the work, on the whole, is a work in transition. During the performance, each of the 52 box-shaped poems are projected onto a wall or screen behind Keohane. He reads from the wall, along with the audience. Audience members can choose to read the text, or to read Keohane’s body, speech, and movements, the way a clinical psychologist would. In Ireland, in order to receive transgender healthcare within the public healthcare system, you must first receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a clinical psychologist, and there’s a waiting list for this appointment. Recent research from Transgender Europe found that trans people in Ireland are waiting up to 10 years for their first assessment. This makes Ireland the worst country in all of Europe for trans healthcare. Boxing Day partially explores this experience of waiting, indefinitely, to be assessed. Boxing Day debuted, three years ago. Since then, Keohane has toured this work in 16 locations across the UK and Europe, including Glasgow, Helsinki, Reykjavík, and Dublin, where it was nominated for the First Fortnight Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival, in 2023.
The event is part of the EFACIS Irish Itinerary and has been supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland and Culture Ireland.
Photo of the author by Molly Ahearn.
