26 April,
In Conversation / Poetry /
Rita Ann Higgins: Jiving with Wasps
Sunday, 26 April 2026, 7:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowWe’re delighted to be closing this year’s festival with the launch of a New and Selected Poems from Rita Ann Higgins.
Jiving with Wasps draws upon four decades of poetry, giving us provocative and heart-warming poems of hi-jinks and telling social commentary by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles. Join Rita Ann Higgins and Edel Coffey in celebrating this defiantly mischievous and playfully subversive poetry.
Rita Ann was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. She left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has since published many books of poetry and prose, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005), Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016) from Bloodaxe; Hurting God: Prose & Poems(2010), Our Killer City: isms, chisms, chasms and schisms: essays and poems (2018) and Pathogens Love a Patsy: Pandemic & Other Poems (2020) from Salmon; and The Long Weekend (Gill, 2024), poems read on RTÉ 1’s Brendan O’Connor Show. Drawing on all of these as well as on later work, her retrospective, Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2026), is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her appearances on the Brendan O’Connor Show during and since the pandemic earned her even wider popularity in Ireland – reading her poems to audiences of over 400,000 on the weekend shows – with O’Connor calling her ‘the people’s poet’.
Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2008), The Empty Frame (2008) and The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors (2014).
Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989, the Living Poets Society Award in 2021, and several Arts Council bursaries. She has held prison workshops in Ireland and the UK, and is a member of Aosdána. She is an Ireland Reads Ambassador, serving in 2025 and 2026.
EDEL COFFEY is a journalist, editor, broadcaster and author with 25 years of experience working in national Irish media, across print, radio and television. She currently works as a freelance journalist and is a regular contributor to The Irish Times, RTE, Today FM and Newstalk. She has published two number-one bestselling novels, for which she received an An Post Irish Book Award. She lives in Galway with her husband and children.
