Walking with Ghosts with Gabriel Byrne and Lily King

$30

Includes a Copy of Walking with Ghosts

Out of stock

Thursday, 7:30 pm EDT February 11, 2021

Online via Zoom

Actor Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, End of Days, In Treatment) will be joined by award-winning author Lily King (Writers & Lovers, Euphoria) to discuss Byrne’s highly anticipated memoir Walking with Ghosts. In it, Byrne conjures a unique portrait of his Irish childhood and his remarkable journey from messenger boy and factory laborer to Hollywood and Broadway success. Weaving between recollections of an Irish upbringing and reflections on stardom, Byrne provides a funny and heartbreaking tale that pays homage to the people and environments that shaped his life and career.

Tickets include a copy of Walking with Ghosts. Due to the popularity of this event, we have run out of signed bookplates.

Presented in partnership with Irish Arts Center.

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In Conversation

Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel Byrne was born in Dublin and has starred in over 80 films for some of the cinema’s leading directors. He won a Golden Globe for his performance on HBO’s In Treatment. On Broadway he won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and has been nominated twice for the Tony Award. He lives in Manhattan and Maine.

Photo by Patrick Fouque/Paris MatchContour by Getty Images
Lily King

Lily King

Lily King is the award-winning author most recently of Writers & Lovers as well as the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s “10 Best Books of 2014,” finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Kirkus Prize. She lives in Maine.
Irish Arts Center
https://irishartscenter.org/

Irish Arts Center
https://irishartscenter.org/

Irish Arts Center (IAC) brings people of all backgrounds together through the evolving arts and culture of Ireland, with emotionally engaging, dynamic experiences that meet the highest standards of artistic excellence, on an intimate scale, in an environment of Irish hospitality. Our programming serves a range of artistic disciplines, including music, dance, theatre, visual arts, film, literature, humanities and interdisciplinary work, and we are committed to the fullest possible engagement of the artist in the cultural life of New York City.

Featured Book

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Walking with Ghosts

By Gabriel Byrne

Published by Grove Books

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working class parents and the eldest of six children, he harbored a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory laborer to get by. In his spare time, he visited the cinema where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of 60s Ireland.

He reveled in the theatre and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.