Introduction

Author Biographies

• Laura P. Z. Izarra, University of São Paulo
  Laura P.Z. Izarra is Full Professor of Literatures in English at the University of São Paulo, Associate Director at USP International Cooperation Office, Coordinator of the W.B.Yeats Chair of Irish Studies/USP and former president of the Brazilian Association of Irish Studies-ABEI (2009-2018). She is author of Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths. The Process of a ‘New’ Aesthetic Synthesis in the Novels of John Banville (NY 1999) and Narrativas de la diáspora irlandesa bajo la Cruz del Sur (Buenos Aires 2010); editor of Da Irlanda para o Brasil: Textos Críticos (since 2009) and Roger Casement in Brazil (2010) with two exhibitions (2010, 2016); co-editor of ABEI Journal (1999-2018), Lectures (since 2010) and the Portuguese translation of The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (2016). She has published widely on Irish contemporary literature; at present, her main research interests are literature of the diaspora, cultural trauma and memory studies.
• Hedwig Schwall, Leuven Centre for Irish
  Hedwig Schwall is director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (LCIS). She is co-editor of the series Irish Studies in Europe (ISE) of which she edited Volume 8 (Boundaries, Passages, Transitions); she was special editor of the issue 2:1 of RISE, the Review of Irish Studies in Europe, on “Irish Textiles: (t)issues in communities and their representation in art and literature” (2018) and edited The Danger and the Glory (2019), a volume of 60 contributions from Irish fiction writers about the art of writing. She is on the board of several Irish studies journals such as the Irish University Review, Studi irlandesi, the Nordic Journal for Irish Studies and the Brazilian Journal for Irish Studies and is Project Director of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS, www.efacis.eu). After having headed literary translation projects (Yeats Reborn & John Banville) she now leads the Kaleidoscope projects (https://kaleidoscope.efacis.eu/. In her research she focuses on contemporary Irish fiction and poetry as well as on European art, often using psychoanalytic theory. She is now preparing a book on Parent-Child Relations in Contemporary Irish Fiction.
• Nicholas Taylor-Collins, Cardiff Metropolitan University
  Nicholas Taylor-Collins is lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He has published widely on both Shakespeare and modern and contemporary Irish literature. His monograph Shakespeare, Memory and Modern Irish Literature is forthcoming with Manchester University Press, while his co-edited (with Stanley van der Ziel) Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2018. In 2020 his Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary Literature and Book Prize Shortlists is published with Routledge. He is currently researching a monograph on death and dying in John Banville’s fiction.