Fellow in Focus: Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe in conversation with Dr. Seán Hewitt
Tuesday, 4 April 2023, 1 – 2pm 
Join us for a lunchtime 'in conversation' event featuring Rooney Writer Fellow Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe in conversation with Dr. Seán Hewitt (School of English, TCD).
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. A finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Award, it was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, National Poetry Day Recommendation, Shakespeare & Co. Year of Reading Selection, and a Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.
Born in India, Nidhi grew up across the Middle East, Europe and North America, before calling Ireland home. Founder of the Play It Forward Fellowships for underrepresented writers, she is poetry editor at Skein Press and Fallow Media, and contributing editor with The Stinging Fly. She co-edited Hold Open The Door, a special commemorative anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press, 2020 | UChicago Press, 2021). She is the recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and currently serves on the Expert Advisory Committee for Culture Ireland as well as the Advisory Board of Diversifying Irish Poetry.
A Global Peace Ambassador with the Institute for Economics & Peace, she has formerly been honoured as a Davis United World College Scholar, Davis Nuclear Nonproliferation Studies Fellow, and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Peace & Conflict Fellow. She earned a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic, MA in Eastern Classics from The Graduate Institute at St. John’s College, and MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin where she was a recipient of the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award. She was appointed Chair of the Rekha Eipe Memorial Foundation for Women’s Empowerment and Education at Amrita University in 2021.
During her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow, Nidhi will research a project titled ‘Honey and the Hare’, an epistemological study into the alchemical quest for the numinous. Taking its departure from Joseph Beuys’s 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, she will investigate the core elements that Beuys used to interrogate and extend his idea of a ‘social sculpture’ in the human relationship to the more-than-human, including the totemic figure of the hare and the elixir of immortality, across both ancient Celtic and Indian traditions.
Seán Hewitt is a poet, writer and literary critic. Before joining Trinity, he held postdoctoral positions at University College Cork and at TCD, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Irish Research Council, respectively. His teaching and research interests are mainly focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and Irish literature. He also has an ongoing interest in the environmental humanities, and in studies of literature and science.
Hewitt's first book-length study, J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021), draws on extensive archival research to illuminate the political, spiritual and aesthetic underpinnings of Synge’s work, and traces his progression towards modernism. He has also published on the works of other Revivalists, including W.B. Yeats, Seumas O’Sullivan, Lady Gregory and, more recently, the poet and novelist Emily Lawless.
His ongoing book project, provisionally entitled ‘Acts of Enchantment: Natural History in British and Irish Literature, 1870-1930’, explores the ways in which writers sought to incorporate and depict the scientific study of the natural world in their works. This project won the Maurice J. Bric Medal of Excellence in 2019. Focusing on modes of ‘enchantment’, it explores the various spiritual turns of post-Darwinian literature through an attention to tactile modes of nature study. Some of the writers he studies in this respect include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Lawless, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Hudson, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.
He is the author of a poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, (Jonathan Cape 2020), which was shortlisted for, amongst others, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and won The Laurel Prize in 2021. His memoir All Down Darkness Wide, (Jonathan Cape), was published in 2022. Hewitt's next book, Three Hundred Thousand Kisses (Penguin, 2023), will be the first book of its kind. Illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, these new versions of both Ancient Greek and Latin texts – from graffiti to incantations, satires to dialogues, histories to poetic myths – bring to readers, for the first time, a full range of the thrilling, multi-faceted and colourful queer tales of the Classical Mediterranean.
He is also a Poetry Critic for The Irish Times.
Please register here.
Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: tlrh@tcd.ie
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Room: Hoey Ideas Space
Event Category: Arts and Culture, Lectures and Seminars, Public
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Researchers, Postgrad, Faculty & Staff, Public
Cost: Free
Contact Name: Trinity Long Room Hub
Contact Email: tlrh@tcd.ie
More info: www.eventbrite.ie…
