Launch of new-look Quarryman literary magazine

15 Apr 2015

Triskel Arts Centre, Saturday, April 25, 9pm. 

UCC gets its literary journal back this month when the new-look Quarryman is re-issued. The magazine will be launched at the close of The Cork World Book Fest on Saturday April 25th at 9pm in the Triskel Arts Centre.

The inaugural MA in Creative Writing class (2013/14) took on the challenge of pumping new blood into the journal, which last appeared in the 1980s.  As poet Thomas McCarthy who writes the introduction to the new-look Quarryman notes, the last incarnation of the magazine marked a particularly fervid era of writing on campus which saw “a new Munster movement in poetry”.

This new edition recognises that generation with contributions by local and alumni poets Greg Delanty, William Wall, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Gerry Murphy, who were part of the flowering of poetry on campus, along with the work of newly graduated writers. 

Booker-nominated Donal Ryan has described the new Quarryman as “a perfect reading excursion, its pages inhabited by cyber-stalkers, bereft lovers, dying crows, web-less spiders, disillusioned radicals, illicit cadavers, and people treading the uncertain pathways of life”.

The cover of the revamped journal features the work of award-winning US artist and illustrator Kevin Sprouls.  Sprouls is the creator of the iconic pointillist portrait style pioneered by the Wall Street Journal, and his artwork brings an apt and striking realism to the journal’s new look.