#DermotBolger - Dermot Bolger is to read from and discuss his novel “The Lonely Sea and Sky-The Story of Irish Seafarers on hazardous voyages to War-Torn Europe”. 

The reading concludes Glenua & Friends 2016-2017 winter lecture season which takes place next Thursday 13 April 2017 (20:00hrs) at the Poolbeg Yacht & Boat Club, Ringsend, Dublin 4. There will be an entry fee of €5 in aid of the RNLI.

Dermot Bolger has written the novel in memory of Irish seafarers like his father who undertook dangerous voyages to Lisbon during World War Two.

The Lonely Sea and Sky charts the maiden voyage of fourteen-year-old Jack Roche aboard a tiny Wexford ship, the Kerlogue, on a treacherous wartime journey to Portugal. After his father’s ship is sunk on this same route, Jack must go to sea to support his family – swapping Wexford’s small streets for Lisbon’s vibrant boulevards: where every foreigner seems to be a refugee or a spy.

The novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the Kerlogue’s crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors – members of the navy that had killed Jack’s father. Forced to choose who to save and who to leave behind, the Kerlogue grows so dangerously overloaded that no one knows if they will survive amid the massive Biscay waves.

Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known poets, playwrights and novelists. The Lonely Sea and Sky is his thirteenth novel. His stage adaption of Joyce’s Ulysses is being staged by the Abbey Theatre during the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival. His New and Selected Poems, That Which is Suddenly Precious, appeared in 2015.

Bolger writes for most of Ireland’s leading newspapers and in 2012 was named Commentator of the Year at the Irish Newspaper awards. His father was a crewman on the Kerlogue’s sister ship, The Edenvale, which also made those dangerous wartime crossings to Lisbon.