Padraic Fiacc: Poet in Belfast

Join poet Joelle Taylor and critic Tara McEvoy for a screening of Der Bomben Poet (1980, BXW, 35 minutes, English with German subtitles)  by German filmmaker Georg Stephan Troller’s which is a portrait of the poet Padraic Fiacc, followed by a conversation. 

Recalling the diary entry that marked their final meeting, this short biopic tours what Troller has called “the social drama” of Fiacc’s urban localities along with the prescient “suspicion” that “after the show” its actors will “drive back to their suburbs to watch themselves on TV” and “the I.R.A. will invite the Ulstermen into the nearest pub.” 

Poignantly, the film also marks the extent to which Fiacc – himself often endangered amid the drama of cities – was "not so worried about [his] life” but more the “work” of his poetry.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author. A former UK slam champion, she founded SLAMbassadors, the UK’s youth slam championships, in 2001 and was its Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. Taylor is a fellow of the RSA and the host and co-curator of Out-Spoken, the UK’s premier poetry and music club, currently resident at the Southbank Centre. Taylor is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent, C+nto & Othered Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 and has been longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Tara McEvoy is Press Officer for Pushkin Press, London, and a 2022 Writing & the City Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University, Belfast. She edits the Belfast-based magazine The Tangerine, and in 2020 completed a PhD in English literature at Queen's, with a focus on the work of Padraic Fiacc.