This festival’s Scot it all

Now in its third year, the annual Crossways: The Irish Scottish Cultural & Literary Festival invites writers and poets from across both nations to come and perform their work and to celebrate their cultural and historical commonalities.

This year the festival, organised by Irish literary journal Irish Pages, will feature 15 literary readings, each with one Scottish and one Irish writer paired together.

There will be a strong Cork presence this year with the likes of Alan Titley and Pádraig Mac Fhearghusa set to perform, as well as UCC alumni Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Gabriel Rosenstock and Biddy Jenkinson.

Taking place online this year, the festival will place particular emphasis Irish-language and Scottish Gaelic works.

The festival was all filmed in November in Scotland and Ireland by Winnie Brook Young, daughter of 'The Inbetweeners' producer Chris Young.

Irish Pages Editor Chris Agee says the festival’s main goal is to foster and expand the “rather weak literary links” across the North Channel while underscoring the longstanding contribution of Irish people, history, language, culture and writing to both Glasgow and the Scottish nation.

“In the view of Irish Pages, such a forum for Irish-Scottish cultural and literary interaction, dialogue and debate of real distinction and diversity, is long overdue,” says Chris.

“The two literary cultures, as it were, have their backs to each other to a surprising degree. Thus, the festival will aim at lessening this contemporary cultural distance, and at a new historical moment where relations between the two islands have already begun to change dramatically with Brexit.”

The festival opens tomorrow (Friday) evening with performances from Simon O’Faoláin and Megan Bateman, followed by Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Anna Frater.

It will run for three days, finishing up on Sunday night with readings from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, Biddy Jenkinson and Maoilios Caimbeul, and Alan Titley and the Glaswegian David Kinloch.

The festival will also feature three musical events all streamed on crosswaysfestival.org.

Appearing twice a year, Irish Pages is a Belfast journal combining Irish, European and international perspectives. Since its full-scale launch in 2003, the journal has established itself as a premier literary journal, combining a large general readership with outstanding writing from Ireland and overseas.