Elizabeth Shanley Gerson Irish Literature Reading
Elizabeth Shanley Gerson earned her Bachelor’s degree from UConn in 1948 and her Masters of Social Work degree here in 1978. The Gerson Irish Reader program was established in Elizabeth’s honor in 1997 by her children and her husband, Lou Gerson, emeritus professor of the political science department at UConn and former department chair.
2019
NICK LAIRD
GERSON READER 2019
APRIL 9, 7:00 pm, Wilbur Cross North Reading Room
Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and currently teaches creative writing at NYU. He has published four poetry collections with Faber and Faber, and his fourth, Feel Free, was shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. He has published three novels with Fourth Estate, most recently Modern Gods (2017). His first, Utterly Monkey, won the 2005 Berry Trask Prize for best first novel. He is a recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A graduate of Cambridge University, he was a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer.
Previous Readers
- Colum McCann (2018)
- Kevin Barry (2017)
- Sinéad Morrissey (2016)
- Claire Kilroy (2015)
- Glenn Patterson (2014)
- In April 2013, UConn was pleased to host James Ryan, Anne Enright, Colm Toíbín, and Belinda McKeon as part of the Gerson Irish Reading in honor of Caroline Walsh and Mary Lavin. The year’s theme, “Mother and Daughter,” was a commemoration of the late Irish Times literary editor Caroline Walsh and her mother, the famous Irish short story writer, Mary Lavin, UConn’s first writer-in-residence in the 1960s. Walsh’s 2012 Gerson talk, cancelled in the wake of her untimely death, had been planned in honor of Lavin’s centenary. The event was covered by newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic: Irish Times and Irish America. Listen to the complete audio recording of the event here.
- Geraldine Mills and Lisa Taylor (2011)
- Frank Delaney (2010)
- Claire Kilroy (2009)
- James Ryan (2008)
- Mary Morrissy (2007)
- Eavan Boland (2006)
- Marina Carr (2005)
- Paul Muldoon (2004)
- Jamie O’Neill (2003)
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2002)
- Colm Tóibín (2001)
- Colum McCann (2000)
- Eamonn Grennan (1999)
- Edna O’Brien (1998)