Samuel Beckett’s Legacies

Nathan O’Donnell is a writer, artist, and one of the co-editors of PVA (Journal + Books). He has published fiction and creative non-fiction as well as working, critically and curatorially, on modern and contemporary art. He makes publications through artistic collaborations, commissions, participatory and public art projects. Most recent of these (both designed by Clare Bell) were The Book of Invasions, a book produced in collaboration with swimmers as part of a commissioned ‘river residency’ with Ormston House in 2023; and Abandoned Prose, a book of discontinued writing produced through a Samuel Beckett Creative Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin in 2024. He was writer-in-residence at Maynooth University, 2020–21, and he has been awarded numerous bursaries and commissions from arts organisations and elsewhere. In 2020, with Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, he founded Numbered Editions, an experimental imprint for artists’ writing. Since 2018, he has been a curatorial associate at IMMA. He lectures on the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD and at Trinity College Dulin.

Bríd is a native of Galway and was a member of the Abbey Theatre company 

until 1999. She has appeared on stage nationally and internationally for that company 

and every other major theatre  company in Ireland.

She has appeared in Samuel Beckett’s Not I, Come and Go for Company SJ  and Dublin 

Theatre Festival and most recently in Happy Days (Laethanta Sona ) directed by Sarah Jane Scaife for the Abbey Theatre and Galway International Arts Festival for which she received the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Actress.

She appeared in the award winning film Róise &Frank for which she won the IFTA for best actress in a lead role . Other film roles include The Banshees of Inisherin, the Polish film Minghun, Advent and the short film Clodagh that was shortlisted for a BAFTA and for the Oscars 

Her most recent film Fréwaka  goes on general release later this month.

Bríd has just finished a very successful run of The Ferryman by Jes Butterworth in the Gaiety Theatre.

Eva Kenny is a writer from Dublin. In 2018, she received a PhD from Princeton for a dissertation on Samuel Beckett and American art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her short fiction and art criticism has been published in The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review of Books, the LA Review of Books, Artforum, ArtPapers and Frieze, as well as numerous artists’ books and exhibition catalogues. She is currently finishing her first book, a collection of stories titled Colonialism with Nowhere to Go. 

Kenny’s work has been supported by an Arts Council Literature Bursary Award and an Agility Award, two Mellon Fellowships, the Princeton Institute for International Studies grants, the Authors League Fund, and residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and the Museum of Literature in Ireland, where she was the inaugural writer-in-residence in 2023.