Kimberly Campanello attends Decade of the Centenaries event with Taoiseach of Ireland

Poet and Professor Kimberly Campanello attended a celebratory reception at Dublin Castle at the invitation of Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

The event included speeches from the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Catherine Martin and Chancellor of the National University of Ireland Dr Maurice Manning.

Professor Campanello was invited due to her involvement in the Decade of the Centenaries (2012-2023) program, for which she won the inaugural Markievicz Award for Literature with two collaborators, Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Dimitra Xidous.

The three poets created (S)worn State(s), which considers the role of women in Ireland in the decade of the centenaries and beyond. It will appear in a letterpress edition with The Salvage Press (Dublin) in 2024. An extract with an introductory essay has been published in The London Magazine’s sold-out Aug/Sept 2023 issue.

Dimitra Xidous, Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Kimberly Campanello.

About the event, Professor Campanello said:

"In light of recent events in Dublin, it was powerful to come together with institutions, local authorities and artists to celebrate this considered approach to commemorating the centenaries of events including the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War.

“In Dublin Castle, the layered presence of statues, heraldry and artwork depicting recent figures and events alongside those from deeper in Ireland's past demonstrates the importance of the work we have done to poetically intervene in received narratives, particularly as related to women."

Professor Campanello also writes creatively about chronic illness and disability. This work has been published in Granta, Tolka and Somesuch Stories and she has been awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice Award by Arts Council England to continue in this vein.

She has discussed her writing on this topic on a podcast for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and for Trinity College Dublin's Seminar Series in the Medical and Health Humanities.

She is the Practice Research Lead in the School of English and a member of the School’s thriving Medical Humanities and Practice Research Groups.