Wondering what the staff at The Seamus Heaney Centre enjoyed this year? Look no further than our exciting staff picks of 2024!

Each member of our staff works hard all year round, now it's time to celebrate another successful year by choosing our favourites. This can be a film, or a theatre production, a book or a poetry collection. Just something that made us think, feel and be inspired! 

2024 has been a BIG year for new writing, but it's also been an incredible year for us here at The Seamus Heaney Centre. With the opening of our new space in June, to our new team members and the amount of wonderful events we've hosted, we want to take a second to celebrate everything 2024 had to offer. 

Enjoy our picks of 2024! 

"Paul B. Preciado’s 2023 Orlando, My Political Biography uses Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, as a skeleton to bring together 26 contemporary trans and non-binary actors, aged 8 to 70, to share the titular role of Orlando in an experimental work of literary, political and personal commentary.

Throughout the film, Orlandos enter and exit, introducing themselves to the camera, talking about their lives and playing out scenes from the novel, sometimes updated to reflect upon contemporary experience, as their words mingle with Woolf’s. Preciado’s film highlights the ways in which Orlando’s story, whilst written nearly a century ago, speaks to the experience of contemporary trans and non-binary life." 

Venomous Lumpsucker might be one of the bleakest books I have ever read, let alone this year. In this short speculative novel Ned Beauman imagines the endgame of mass extinction and the absurd lengths we might go to avoid reckoning with that nightmare; Ho Ho Horrifying. 

It is also one of the funniest, playing out like one long dark joke. What do you get when you cross a marine biologist, a broker, and a globetrotting adventure to find the most intelligent fish on the planet? An absolute riot. 

My pick of the year is "Inside Out 2". Taking my daughter to see "Inside Out 2" in the cinema was a big event for both of us. The original is a family favourite and the sequel boldly expands the cast of emotions, adds complexity and beauty to the hero's inner world, and opened up important conversations between us about the inevitability of change in our lives and relationship. It made the big bad future feel a little less scary. 

Paul B. Rainey’s Why Don’t You Love Me seems, at first glance, to be completely miserable. And, to be clear, it is often miserable.

We open on a seemingly mundane nightmare, following a catatonically depressed mother and a harried, regretful father raising two children in a shabby British house. She is often cruel to her family. Each page opens as it would on a black-and-white newspaper comic the book imitates, with the repetition of the title ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’. This acts as a punchline for the first half of the collection, landing home moments of brutal bleak comedy. Then Rainey starts to answer that question, in unexpectedly sly, funny, moving and existentially challenging ways. As the comic moves in entirely new ways, our understanding of the narrative shatters, near completely. Rainey asks; how do normal people reckon with the loss of everything that matters? How can we love despite everything? 

The Tragedy of Richard III was a spectacle in the eyes and the mind. A tale so familiar, repetitive and true, yet this production brought real life to the story, and experimented with the characters, the design and the message.  

Reflecting on the year, one of my standout moments has to be witnessing the ending scenes of the Tragedy of Richard III. The lighting design and set, an effective and legendary fighting sequence that I will truly never forget. The show itself was a comedic and inclusive re-telling of the classical Shakespearean tale. With stand-out performances from the entire cast, this show wasn’t one to miss; it was nice to see the Theatre so full!