Highlighting the diverse array of writers across Dublin, the Irish Writers Centre is putting out a series of videos entitled One City, Many Stories. In one episode entitled An Island of Many Nations, the initiative celebrates Ireland’s multicultural literary landscape through the voices of writers who have made Ireland their home.
Suad Aldarra
Rooney Award-winning writer Suad Aldarra made headlines last year with her memoir I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, capturing her memories of her home country of Syria and her journey to Ireland.
The book, she said, is borne out of her own grief and depression she was having at the time, finding that writing the stories down was the only way forward.
“I started writing these stories that were pressuring my memory a lot, that were begging to be written, as they say,” Aldarra said. “And I started there, like the chapters were not following a timeline. They were just randomly picked, but they were picked by how much they were affecting my mental health and how much they were keeping me inside this bubble where I couldn’t move forward. So every story I wrote, every chapter I wrote, freed me a bit from that.”
Aldarra said while the book was initially pigeonholed as a refugee story, people are connecting with beyond that now. Her focus was portraying Syria to a Western audience, describing it beyond destruction and politics and more on how she grew up: her grandmother’s cooking, her cats and her love story. She said people have said the book changed their perspective on Syria.
“Once I opened it all, and I was much lighter whenever I talk to people and whenever I meet anyone,” Aldarra said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I don’t have my history, my nationality, my background, nothing to hide. I’m a writer. I’m from Syria. Here’s my book. Read about it. It helped me be comfortable in my own skin.”
In the last year, Syria’s political circumstances have changed radically with the fall of the Assad regime. For the first time in over a decade, Aldarra went home.
“I was reading the prologue, and it’s so different now because whenever I read that before, before the collapse of the regime in December, I would feel sad, and I would choke with the words, because it hit home for me,” Aldarra said. “But I read it for the first time after my visit to Syria, and I was just so happy, and I felt the texts were out of context now that it was completely different, that I’m not that stranger anymore, I can make that trip home. And I keep saying to people, like the title should be now ‘I Want to Talk about Home’, because I can’t stop talking about home.”
Rafael Mendes
Poet Rafael Mendes won the Ireland Chair for Poetry Pamphlet Series 2025 for The Migrant Dictionary, a dictionary entry-style work featuring Ulysses reimagined as a migrant.
“The dictionary entry gave me both a way to play with language itself, to play with the official language of England since English is not my first language, but I also play with the main character of Irish literature, or one of the main characters of Irish literature,” Mendes said.
Originally from Brazil, Mendes first planned to come to Ireland to learn English then go back home for a Ph.D. and to become a diplomat. Now, he’s wrapping up a Ph.D. at Trinity College in Hispanic and Latin American Studies, tackling queer and feminist studies.
Paralleling Mendes’s poetry, the thesis allowed him to analyze the same topics but with a different structure and intellectual approach.
Spurring on Mendes’s poetry initially was the Irish Writers Centre with their programme for non-native English speakers interested in creative writing. After his own time in the program, Mendes is now a teacher.
“The community, the people who go there, the atmosphere of the group, is something that really, really deeply speaks to my heart, because they see the value of that is through your community,” Mendes said. “I see that the people who go there attend those sessions. I see the passion that they have. I see how that space helps those people who are trying to make Ireland a home, and they need the language to make Ireland their home.”
Gustav Parker Hibbett
Every time a new exhibit opens, Temple Bar Gallery artist-in-residence Gustav Parker Hibbett captures the deliberation and artistry behind these unique works.
“[Poetry] helps me honour what feels like very deliberate, dimensional choices on the part of the artist,” they said. “A lot of these exhibitions, it feels the same way, you come in and it feels like every aspect of down to the centimeter where things are placed in the gallery, even thinking about the first place a viewer’s eyes will land when they enter the gallery, and then how that makes them move through it, all of those things have been thought about. And obviously, l can’t capture all those dimensions, but I want to try to capture as many as possible.”
Hibbett said installations range from craft chandeliers to sculptures and sketches to video, and they said these works push the boundaries of what the gallery can display and what the viewer can experience. Their poetry acts as a companion and to prepare, Hibbett learns about the artist, exhibition and everything behind the scenes that supports it.
Recently, Hibbett also released their first poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus, harkening back to their obsession with high jump through secondary school.
“The response has been very affirming,” they said. “A lot of the, especially the high jump, poems were things that I didn’t think other people would understand. It’s like, a very specific sport, to describe it in the way a poem needs the immediacy of, there’s context that I have that other people won’t and so, like, I can’t get directly there. And I thought there was so many it was too many layers of context deep.”
The collection was nominated for both the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.
Putting together High Jump transitioned Hibbett’s work from individual poems to one longer work, which they said made them feel more like a poet. The collection is a curated emotional journey, one they balanced between being too overt and too subtle.
“That sort of affirming reception has meant that now I have a lot more faith in poetry as an art and what it can and can’t hold,” Hibbett said. “Anything that I tried to put into it, any thought that I wanted to put into it, any way of seeing the world, it could hold.”
Ciara Ni É
Bilingual poet Ciara Ni É was recently called a “cool Irish language poet,” which she says was an impossible sentence just two years ago. Integrated into the Irish language poetry community, Ni É runs REIC, an open mic night dedicated to Irish language poetry, as well as AerachAiteachGaelach, a LGBTQ+ Irish-language art collective.
“I chose the word reic in Irish, which comes from the root recite, because it’s a spoken word event, but also because it sounds like W-R-E-C-K in English,” she said. “And it’s just to give people a space to come and use whatever Irish they have and not be worried about wrecking it. Like I’d say, well, try and wreck it. Like you could try your best. The language has been here for thousands of years, so you writing one poem that has some grammar mistakes is not going to kill it.”
After learning Irish in school, Ni É was inspired by some of her teachers that taught the language culturally, which helped her connect to her ancestry. She said it tends to make sense to Irish people because the way many Irish people speak English is based on not traditional English grammar but instead, Irish grammar.
“It’s only when you actually, like, realize that, no, we’re not speaking English, we’re speaking Irish translated into English,” she said.
Ni É writes in both English and Irish, often translating her own poems between the two languages. The risk, she said, is if English-only speakers can’t understand the translation out of Irish. Not all her poems are translated, though.
Ni É has also written in Irish and English simultaneously.
“It really makes you question your own lines,” Ni É said. “You know, if you write something in one language, then you translate it. You translate it. You might change the English. Then that might change what you might change back into the art, so they can be working off each other.”
Words: Kaavya Butaney
Feature Image: Saud Aldarra
Dublin: One City, Many Stories is a six-part video series celebrating Dublin’s 15th anniversary as a UNESCO City of Literature. Each episode pairs acclaimed and emerging writers in conversation, exploring themes of creativity, community and connection.
An Island of Many Nations is available on the Irish Writers Centre’s YouTube channel and at irishwriterscentre.ie.
