Edna O’Brien will deliver this year’s T. S. Eliot Lecture on Eliot and Joyce on her birthday, 15th December. The Leap is the fifth in a series of lectures inspired by T. S. Eliot’s impact on modern literature presented by the Abbey Theatre and the T. S. Eliot Foundation.

Adrian O’Neill, the Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, will introduce the lecture. There will be a post-event interview with Edna O’Brien and Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan. Actor Sinéad Cusack will also perform from Eliot’s work.

The lecture will be streamed from the Irish Embassy in London and will premiere on the Abbey Theatre’s YouTube channel at 7:30pm on Tuesday 15th December. The lecture is free and will be available for one month. It can be accessed via the Abbey Theatre’s website here.

Edna O’Brien has written more than twenty works of fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years.