Baggotonia Festival - Book of the Festival

About the Event
Baggotonia Festival is delighted and honoured to host the launch of the second edition of Brendan Lynch's book; Prodigals and Geniuses, the Writers and Artists of Dublin's Baggotonia.

This event will take place at United Arts Club, 3 Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2 on the evening of Wednesday 18th September from 6.30pm and all are welcome. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase on the night and refreshments will be served.

Baggotonia Festival would like to thank both the United Arts Club (UAC) and South Georgian Core Residents Association (SGCRA) for their kind support of this important event.

About the Book

Centred on Baggot and Leeson Streets, and girdled by the Grand Canal, it is the unmapped village of writers, artists and ne'er-do-wells which in the 1950's became known as "Baggotonia".

London has Fitzrovia, Paris its Left Bank. But Georgian Dublin boasts an equally atmospheric Bohemian quarter. Its inhabitants and habitués include four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and nearly every nineteenth and twentieth century Irish writer of note.

From Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, George Moore and George Bernard Shaw to Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. And a profusion of artists from Jack B. Yeats to Mainie Jellett and Camille Souter, who painted in the shadow of Francis Bacon's Baggot Street birthplace.

Brendan Behan's neighbours included Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty and Mary Lavin. John Banville, Maeve Binchy and Colm Toibí­n were later arrivals.

Based on interviews and contemporary accounts - "PRODIGALS AND GENIUSES" is an entertaining and enlightening history of a remarkable time and place.

Foreword writer J. P. Donleavy (author of "The Ginger Man") described PRODIGALS as an overdue and comprehensive record of a rich period in Irish literary history. He continued:

"Brendan Lynch"s book evokes vibrant memories of an ancient Dublin. And could there be any other city in the world more worth speaking about? Old friends come back to life whose minds still speak from the soul. Ancient sorrows remembered to haunt, but in which a bit of bright light still glows."

To Purchase the Book

Signed copies of Brendan Lynch's book; Prodigals and Geniuses, the Writers and Artists of Dublin's Baggotonia will be available at this event on the night and to purchase books in advance please email [email protected]

Host or Publisher Baggotonia Festival