Wicklow Author and Broadcaster invited to speak at Listowel Food Fair

The 25th annual Listowel Food Festival took place from 7th to the 11th of November in the Kerry town perhaps more known for its International Writers’ Week and JB Keane. However, the Food Festival, now in its 25th year, is also the oldest running food festival in Ireland. This year Jillian Godsil, Wicklow author and presenter of Wicklow This Week on East Coast FM was one of the invited guests asked to speak on the topic of Words and Cuisine by writer and literary agent Jeremy Murphy.

Murphy, a native of Listowel and also involved in the May literary event, opted for a literary-themed talk.

Murphy spoke on the how food and society are inextricable linked, “We learned how banquets, feasts and dinner parties are used to symbolise society. Think about it: who sits at the head of the dinner table, who serves the food and who is outside in the cold not invited, is an effective symbol for the wider social structure. Novelists like Joyce, Flaubert and Mann have reaped this to great advantage.

“Brendan Kennelly’s poem Bread is masterful; from the baking and kneading of bread he constructs a beautiful allegory, but the poem also bristles with visceral emotion.

“Reciting Kavanagh’s lyrically guttural verse in an area that had been scourged by the Great Famine…