The Crescent Arts Centre is home to one of the largest swift colonies in Ireland.

To celebrate the beauty of these migratory birds, join award-winning author and naturalist Mark Cocker in conversation with Northern Irish nature writer and poet Mary Montague.

In One Midsummer's Day, Mark tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts. 

These birds without borders reflect the unity of the planet, illuminating how all creatures, including ourselves, are inextricably connected.

(And while you’re here do look up to see if you can spot a swift, or listen out for their distinctive screech!) 

Meet the writers

Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist who writes on Nature in a variety of national media including The Guardian, Country Life and The Spectator. His 14 books include A Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes from a Small Planet (2019), which won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award, and Crow Country, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the New Angle Prize. In 2025 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Reviewing his last work, John Banville (The Irish Times), wrote ‘Cocker is both a superb prose stylist, with a poet’s eye and ear, and a naturalist of wide erudition and imaginative reach… One Midsummer’s Day is a wonderful book – literally, a book of wonders.’ 

Mary Montague’s poetry collections are: Tribe (Dedalus 2008); and Black Wolf on a White Plain (Summer Palace 2001). Her poems have been widely anthologised, e.g. in Queering the Green (edited by Paul Maddern, Lifeboat Press 2021), and translated into several languages. She is a monthly contributor to The Guardian’s Country Diary, and her work features in Under the Changing Skies, The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (edited by Paul Fleckney, Faber and Faber 2024).