Every Life is Many Days is a podcast about James Joyce and his family in the contemporary novel. Presented by Professor Anne Fogarty of the School of English, Drama and Film at UCD and Director of the UCD James Joyce Research Centre, the podcast looks at how the many gaps between Joyce the man and Joyce the writer have in recent years been movingly explored in a number of novels that think about his life in very different ways.
2022 marks the centenary of the publication of Ulysses on the 2 February 1922 by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Inevitably, much attention will centre on Ulysses this year, but the centenary also provides an opportunity to reconsider James Joyce’s legacy and to think about how we view him both as a person and as a literary icon.
The series features the work of five authors who have woven Joyce and his family into their novels: Anna Vaught, Nuala O’Connor, Frank McGuinness, Mary Costello, and Mary Morrissey. In conversation with them, we will discuss many aspects of Joyce’s influence on the modern novel. We’ll examine the much mythologised, but often unremembered, aspects of the lives of his partner, Nora Barnacle, and Lucia Joyce and Georgio Joyce, Joyce’s son and daughter. This podcast explores why Joyce continues to act as such a lively source of inspiration for contemporary fiction writers.
Anna Vaught is a novelist, poet, essayist, short fiction writer, editor, proof-reader, copywriter and also a secondary English teacher, tutor, mentor to young people, mental health advocate, campaigner and mother of three. Her Saving Lucia (Bluemoose, 2020) intertwines the stories of Violet Gibson, the Irish aristocrat who shot Mussolini, Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, Blanche, a patient of Charcot at the Salpetrière clinic in Paris, and Anna O, analysed and written about by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Anna’s reviews, features, short stories, creative nonfiction, poems and memoir pieces are widely published in journals, anthologies, and the press; she is also a monthly columnist for The Bookseller. She has written a new novel, The Zebra and Lord Jones, and a non-fiction book on gentle productivity in writing, The Alchemy. annavaughtwrites.com
