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Writing in the Stupid Age

Join us for our annual lecture, which this year will be delivered by the acclaimed novelist, poet and biographer, Anne Haverty. A recipient of the Rooney Prize and a member of Aosdána, Anne has been publishing for over twenty-five years.

Anne’s lecture will look at the regression of language and culture in our modern times.

‘You may be affronted by my description of the present age. No one wants to think they live and have their days not, as every generation likes to believe, in the best of all possible times, but in the stupidest. They certainly don’t want to think they themselves are stupid. To explain it, briefly: we are in thrall to a culture processed through the new technology, a technology we are dazzled by. Our capacities are becoming redundant, our individual agency is fading away, our language dwindles into cliche. Essential components of our human intelligence, our human forms of expression, are in the process of being discarded and even suppressed. We seem to be happy, even eager, to allow our freedom, our very capacity to think, to be taken from us. This is what I mean by “stupid”…’

The lecture will be followed by a short Q&A.

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Anne Haverty’s first novel, One Day As A Tiger (1997), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. The Far Side Of A Kiss followed four years later and was long listed for the Booker Prize. The Free And Easy, a satire about the Celtic Tiger, was published in 2006. Anne’s poetry collections are The Beauty of the Moon (1999) and A Break In The Journey (2018). A frequent contributor to The Irish Times, she is also a noted biographer and critic.

‘a singing voice for “our dejected age”…’
Derek Mahon

‘A skilled wordsmith capable of wielding an inked scalpel to delightful and dastardly effect, yet she never abandons compassion for the sake of literary evisceration.’
Manchán Magan, The Irish Times

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The Stinging Fly is a literary magazine, a book publisher, an education provider, and an online platform. A registered charity, our mission is to seek out, nurture, publish and promote the very best new writers and new writing.

Our Annual Lecture began as an initiative of Words Ireland and Bray Literary Festival in 2018. Each year since then we have commissioned a writer to reflect upon their experience of the writing life and the development of their creative practice. Previous lectures, which are all available to read on our website, have been delivered by Sean O’Reilly and Jan Carson (2018), Mia Gallagher (2019), Paul Lynch (2020), Kevin Power (2022) and Evelyn Conlon (2023).