For this year's Dublin UNESCO City of Literature lecture, Prof. Chris Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, will look at Sean O'Casey, one of Dublin’s most admired playwrights at the height of his fame, and some of the ways in which both the city, and the National Theatre, nurtured his remarkable talent.

One hundred years ago, on February 8, 1926, Sean O’Casey’s play about the 1916 Rising, The Plough and the Stars, sparked one of the most controversial and memorable nights in the history of the Abbey Theatre, when there were protests in the theatre, and a ringing defence of the play from the stage by W.B. Yeats. However, O’Casey’s relationship with the Abbey was always complicated, and would ultimately break down completely.

Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19. His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City, published in 2023, maps the city’s literary memory. Among his other books are Yeats on Theatre (2021), A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002), A History of the Media in Ireland (2009) and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016). He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel and writing a new book about Irish literary salons. He was the 2022 Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and curated the Unseen Plays series for the Abbey Theatre (2021); from 2009 to 2014, he served as the first chair of the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. He was elected to Membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, and to Fellowship of Trinity in 2016.