Kae Tempest: ‘I’m not a star, am I?’
Multi-talented playwright, poet and novelist on latest album The Line is a Curve
‘Dearest love Teddy’: Sylvia Plath letters, photos and wedding rings for sale
Sotheby’s auction personal items including photo album from Frieda Hughes’ collection
Keith Duggan: Sports stars find their voices in a troubled year
It’s the athletes rather than the owners who have the conch now. When did that happen?
Another Life: None flies straighter or with more urgency than the wren
Michael Viney: This little bird’s adaptability and pioneering spirit has created about 50 distinct races in different habitats worldwide
Irish painter’s estate includes unpublished Heaney poem
Cambridge University pays ‘six-figure sum’ for material belonging to late Barrie Cooke
Rathbones Folio prize: Raymond Antrobus becomes first poet to win award
‘Exceptionally brave and kind’ – judges praise The Perseverance which uses the writer’s experience of deafness to explore human communication
Love in a modern climate: is romance just an antidote to loneliness?
David Eldridge investigates matters of the heart in Beginning at The Gate Theatre
Pike no longer deemed to be the unacceptable foe
Arrival of the alien, red-eyed roach changed fish life in Ireland’s lakes and rivers
Finding sanctuary, and love, in the wilds of Connemara
Ann Henning Jocelyn came to Ireland in the 80s to write, and settled in Doon House, where Poet Laureate Ted Hughes once lived after Sylvia Plath’s death
Japan’s ‘mad scientists’ pursue a cyborg-friendly future
An emerging scientific field seeks to combine living tissue with metals and plastics
England football team remains Ireland’s dark obsession
Our neighbour threatening to win a World Cup still raises the hackles of many Irish
Leaving Cert English paper 2: Relief as predicted poets appear
No unpleasant surprises in an exam which asserts the importance of literature
Skylarks stunned me, just like the poets the bird has hoisted into verse
Another Life: Michael Viney on his awe for a key voice in ‘Dawn Chorus 2018’
Enda Walsh: Grief is the Thing with Feathers floored me
Max Porter's acclaimed novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers is being adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy
Fine, feathered friends and neighbours: The week’s best theatre
Cillian Murphy stars in Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Plus: The Unmanageable Sisters at the Abbey and THISISPOPBABY’s mini-St Patrick’s festival
How the west gave a poet his dream and identity
Another Life: Michael Viney on Richard Murphy’s Connemara life
Elmet review: There will be blood on the Booker longlist
A marginalised Yorkshire family battle their community in a well-written but flawed debut from Fiona Mozley
James Bond needs Daniel Craig, hence the €132m fee
He’s the first actor in the series who is ‘bigger than Bond’. They were desperate to keep him
Sylvia Plath letters reveal abuse by Ted Hughes
Previously unpublished correspondence from the poet detail allegations of beating and says Hughes told her he wished she was dead
Madge Herron: Eccentric and brilliant Irish poet of London’s streets
The legacy of the Donegal-born poet and performer has been reclaimed in a new book
Una Mullally: Why women have risen to the top in 1916 lore
‘In a country with a lot of barrier-breaking to be done for women, a female narrative is a welcome one’
Radio: It’s a struggle to move on when all roads lead to Paris
Review: ‘Sunday with Miriam’, ‘Marian Finucane’, ‘The Right Hook’, ‘Off the Ball’, ‘Tom Dunne’, ‘Moth’
Poetic beasts: rhyming cats and dogs
Poets find fruitful focus in writing about their domestic pets, says Maureen Kennelly
A faltering biography of Ted Hughes
Jonathan Bate focuses on the poet’s love life, particularly with Sylvia Plath, at the expense of insight into his work
Book collecting: ‘People get a feeling for a book and they must have it’
‘First Editions’ in Dublin’s Ballsbridge is a popular destination for book lovers
Irish Lives: Inishbofin and the lure of that Inish Festival
Peadar King’s love of Inishbofin is clear from the weekend’s schedule of stimulating events
A tough brief: selecting the first Laureate for Irish Fiction
Passionate, relentlessly energetic and possessing a collegial focus: ahead of the announcement of the inaugural laureate in The Irish Times, the selection panel discuss what they are looking for
The little-known Connemara interlude in Ted Hughes’s life
A play about the poet’s escape to Ireland with his new partner after the death of Sylvia Plath isn’t particularly kind to Hughes
Donegal poet and playwright Francis Harvey dies at age of 89
‘Poet who made your hair stand on end’ has published five collections
Experience and precocity on the Poetry Now shortlist
Contemporary Irish poetry is doing well, as the breadth of work up for the Irish Times Poetry Now award demonstrates
Brought to Book: Gerald Dawe on the joy of getting a book in place and the anxiety after
`Use it or lose it'
Abstract expressionist artist Barrie Cooke dies in Co Carlow
Painter was based in Ireland since 1954 and was a leading contemporary artist
Another Life: Wren Boys herald tales of the tiny king of birds
What were – are – the Wren Boys all about? Was there an elder in the village who told of how the wren should ever have been ‘the king of all birds’? Or why it should be killed, or spared, on St Stephen’s Day, and why everyone had to stump up for the ‘burial’?
Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’
His books sold and continue to sell in the tens of thousands, while hordes of ‘Heaneyboppers’ flocked to his readings
Adam White: From turning wood to turns of phrase
After a dip in work, carpenter Adam White discovered his gift for poetry – and now his first collection is up for a major prize
The advertising guru who wants to cure cancer
Lord Saatchi says his Irish-born wife’s death from cancer has opened his eyes
British writer’s little known Connemara retreat to host festival
Cashel home a retreat for Ted Hughes after death of Sylvia Plath
Why ‘The Bell Jar’ echoes 50 years on
Sylvia Plath’s relationship with her most famous work was not easy, but it retains its power after five decades
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