Bernadette Brennan
speaker
419 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2018
last heard 29 May
Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Interestingly, he's actually full of hope for the future.
So I'll leave it at that for people to discover in his book how he sees that hope.
But he's also a realist and can tell us some of the issues that we really need to be spending a lot more time thinking about, including AI.
I think maybe a shout out to Anne Mossop for putting this bunch of writers together.
What an extraordinary achievement this year really was.
Ghost in the Throat is like this book we're going to talk about today, a work of extraordinary imagination, which is also a bit auto-fiction.
So what we have in Ghost in the Throat is a young mother who is in the throes of giving birth to a number of children and breastfeeding and caught in that, you could say drudgery, except it's not drudgery to this particular narrator.
She's had difficulties with her mental health over the years, and that's relevant for understanding this new book, although you can read this new book knowing nothing of Doreen Negrefa's work.
The narrator of The Young Mother of A Ghost in the Throat, she says that she's got the voice of another woman that has haunted her throat, and that other woman is...
is an 18th century poet, an Irish poet.
Yes, by the name of Eileen Dove Nicolau.
So throughout the book, the mother becomes obsessed, obsessed is the right word, with this poem and with this woman's history of why she wrote this poem.
And so the book interweaves many different life stories and The Ghost in the Throat is the
reanimation and the re-examination and the celebration of this 18th century poem and this 18th century poet in the absolute present of the narrator, writer, who's speaking now while she's having her children and surviving being very poor in Ireland.
Well, again, since we've mentioned A Ghost in the Throat, we enter this story in a sense back with that same narrator, but some years on.
And what we have is a woman who's moved to yet another rental, who's cleaning up a house, and she gets her mail forwarded to her and she sees a for sale sign and that always captures her imagination because she's forever needing to move to the next rental when the landlord boots her out.
That takes a page or two.
So we really get into it in that she sees for sale a new development in what was the Cork County District Asylum.
Now, they've already knocked down the internals of most of this asylum and put up some pretty flash apartments.
But the latest development, if you like, is that they're going to do up the chapel.
Showing 21–40 of 419 · page 2 of 21
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