Literature and The Arts
Banagher has a thriving poetry scene and an annual poetry festival called Readings from the Pallet takes place in local bars. The town was one of the settings for the series Pure Mule, as featured on RTÉ television. The mini-series was an RTÉ production and shot in 2005 in Banagher, Birr and Tullamore. The series was favourably received by the critics, although some locals maintain that it portrays midlanders in a bad light. The series won four IFTA awards in 2005.
In the past Banagher was noted for a number of crafts, including pottery and a popular pottery company, called Crannóg Pottery, was established at the West End by Valerie Landon in the early 1950s. It closed down in the 1980s.
Johnny McEvoy is from Banagher and is a popular singer of Country and Irish genre. The internationally renowned folk-singer Roger Whittaker took up residence in Banagher for about 10 years until 2006. During the time he purchased and renovated Lairakeen House. The town has also had a number of well-known writers staying for varying periods of time.
Mark Boylan is a singer/songwriter from Banagher. He was born in 1997 and first came to prominence when he wrote the theme song for the 2011 Cheltenham horse racing festival in England. The song is entitled The Festival and it received over 40,000 views on YouTube. Boylan has since written a song for one of the biggest horse races in the world, The Breeders' Cup. He performed the song at the event which took place at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky on 4 November 2011. The proceeds of the song went to the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund (PDJF) and the song has been made available through the iTunes medium.
Famous quotes containing the words literature and/or arts:
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such—of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)