Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies opens its 2025-2026 series with a reading by Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s leading writers, on September 12 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The event is free and open to the public; free tickets are required and are available to reserve in advance through University Ticketing [event is currently sold out]. The theater is an accessible venue, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
During her visit to Princeton, Enright will read from her most recent novel, The Wren, The Wren, which won the 2024 Writers’ Prize for Fiction. The New York Times calls the novel “a powerful, thoughtful book by one of the great living writers on the subject of family,” and The Guardian notes The Wren, The Wren is “a supple scrutiny of familial relationships…a meditation on this other way of connecting—or failing to connect—through language.” Enright will also give a preview of Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World, her forthcoming essay collection that unites her cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing. Attention will be published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton in April. At the event, books will be available to purchase and to have signed.
Anne Enright. Photo credit: Ruth Connolly
Enright is the author of many essays, one book of nonfiction, two short story collections, and eight novels. She won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering; the 2011 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz; and the 2015 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award for The Green Road. Appointed the first Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2015, she is also the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize, among others. Enright is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. She is currently Professor of Fiction at University College Dublin.
The 2025-26 Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired by Jane Cox, Professor of the Practice in Theater and Director of the Program in Theater & Music Theater at the Lewis Center, and Robert Spoo, Princeton’s Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters.
The Fund for Irish Studies affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the lecture series. Additional events scheduled for the year include:
- October 3 — Writer and editor Sinéad Gleeson
- October 30 (Thursday) — Award-winning film and television director Aoife Kelleher
- November 14 — Acclaimed actor and writer/director Olwen Fouéré, visiting through a continued partnership with the Abbey Theatre
- February 8, 2026 (Sunday) — Musician Matt Molloy, member of traditional Irish folk band The Chieftains
- March 20 — Author, critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture
- April 10 — Biographer and editor Merlin Holland
The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
