- Leslie Daiken (1912-64), radical Irish writers and Transnational Circles of Solidarity in the 1930s'

School of History, UCC

Katrina Goldstone, independent researcher & writer

Thursday 6 October 2022, 16.00 (4 PM)

The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. To obtain a link, please, contact Dr Jerôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper This paper will focus on a group of Irish writers, poets and artists based in London and America in the 1930s, and present an overview of how their lives and literary ambitions were transformed by becoming participants in transnational and diasporic networks of other Irish writers, socialists and anti-fascists, and working within the cultural and political groups blossoming throughout the thirties, connected to key publications like Left Review, publishers like Lawrence & Wishart and, as part of the Aid Spain movement, volunteers to support the struggle of Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War. Writers such as Leslie Daiken and Michael Sayers were in the social circles of George Orwell, T.S Eliot as well as communist writers such as Randall Swingler. As both activists and writers, they were Irish witnesses to the seismic events of the 1930s, the rise of Hitlerism and the devastation of economic depression in Britain and America, and left accounts in poems, memoirs, newspapers, and unpublished manuscripts. As an independent researcher, Katrina Goldstone has written extensively on minorities, cultural diversity, and Jewish communities since the 1990s. She has contributed features, in-depth articles, and reviews to numerous publications in Ireland and the UK. She has also been a regular contributor to many arts programs on RTE, the national broadcaster, commenting on Jewish history, Jewish writers, the Holocaust, Anne Frank, and various aspects of cultural diversity, notably in the documentary No More Blooms: Ireland’s Attitudes to Jewish Refugees (Louis Lentin, 1997). In December 2020, her book Irish Writers and the Thirties; Art, Exile & War was published in Routledge’s Studies in Cultural History series and is a groundbreaking study on the relationships and role of Irish writers responding to the key political crises of the 1930s, based on previously unseen archival material, memoirs, letters, and poems. In 2021, she presented ‘Jewish Writers and the Blacklist Years; Artur Miller, “The Crucible” and the Blacklist; Jewish women writers, fiction and non-fiction in the twentieth century’ in the Great Jewish Books module in Jewish Studies in Trinity College, and she gave lectures on Jewish women writers (non-fiction and fiction in 20th century) for the same module in 2018.