A screening of the film I Could Read the Sky (2000) is to be held to remember its star, the Irish writer Dermot Healy, who died earlier this year, on Wednesday, December 3, at 7.15pm, at the Horse Hospital arts centre in London. It will also serve as a fundraiser for the venue which is threatened with closure.
Healy, drawing on his own earlier years, took the lead role in the film, channelling the Irish emigrant experience into a moving document of universal resonance. The film's director and producer, Nichola Bruce and Janine Marmot respectively, will be present, as will Healy's obituarist Sean O'Hagan, the Guardian's award-winning photography and feature writer. The evening will be hosted by Gareth Evans.
Actor and comedian Michael Smiley will also read on the night and Irish traditional music trio Three Dollar Shoe will perform.
O'Hagan's obituary in the Guardian read: "The Irish writer Dermot Healy, who has died aged 66, was once described by Seamus Heaney as 'the heir to Patrick Kavanagh'. If Healy's poetry was steeped in the same rural tradition as Kavanagh's, his novels evoked a more fractured interior world, with characters who often seemed haunted or on the verge of psychological disintegration. Despite being lauded in Ireland, Healy remained a bafflingly under-appreciated writer elsewhere. He wrote five works of fiction, including A Goat's Song (1994), one of the great Irish novels of recent times, as well as several volumes of plays and poetry and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). His fellow writer Pat McCabe described the latter book as 'probably the finest memoir… written in Ireland in the last 50 years', while Roddy Doyle once called Healy 1Ireland's finest living novelist'."
For more information, visit the Horse Hospital website.
