Collaboration with Adam Mickiewicz University
in Poznan
In 2004 our school funded two scholarships for the School
of English at Adam Mickiewicz University IFA (Institue
of English Philology), one for the best MA / Ph.D. candidate
in the newly opened Chair of Irish Literature, and the
other for a Visiting Professor from Ireland. In May 2004
Paul Durcan, one of the most prominent contemporary Irish
poets, was such Visiting Professor. The bookshop 'Bookarest'
at the Browar Shopping Mall was filled with a sizable
group of admirers of his poetry. A year later, the IFA
invited Anne Haverty - a writer from the Emerald Isle
- and meetings with her and her prose and poetry took
place at Collegium Novum. The PROGRAM-Bell scholarship
program is scheduled to be continued in 2006/2007.
Since 2002 we have been actively involved in the promotion
of Irish literature in Poland - it was then that meetings
with Irish poets and writers were organised for the first
time at Collegium Novum, to be crowned with publication
of fragments of their works both in Polish and English.
In the years 2002-2005 PROGRAM-Bell contributed to five
such volumes, among them an anthology of Irish literature,
collections of poems by Paul Durcan, Anthony Cronin,
Anne Haverty, Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce as well
as prose by Dermot Healy. We are proud of the fact that
as an English school we have an opportunity to contribute
to promotion of the English-language literature of a
nation of such long tradition of independence and strong
cultural identity.
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