The English Department is delighted to kick off our first Poetry and Poetics event of the year with Gail McConnell, who will read from her award-winning debut The Sun is Open, followed by a discussion. The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of Gail's father, Assistant Governor of the Maze Prison, William McConnell, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. The late Ciarán Carson described it as 'meticulous and painstaking—sometimes pain-making work... credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.'
Gail McConnell is from Belfast. She is interested in the living and the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), won the The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014) and two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.