DOUBLE SHOT is a series of poetry readings at the new Books Upstairs premises on D'Olier Street which will provide a platform for one emerging and one established poet to share their work. We place a special emphasis on poets from outside Dublin who have fewer opportunities to read here.

Our third line up on the 15th April features Breda Wall Ryan and Martin Dyar.

Breda Wall Ryan is from Co Waterford and lives in Co. Wicklow. She has an M.Phil. in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin. Her fiction has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award, Francis MacManus Award, Elizabeth Bowen / William Trevor Award and The Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. She won the iYeats, Poets Meet Painters and Dromineer Poetry Competitions and Over the Edge New Writer of the Year, 2013. She was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2014 and placed second in Patrick Kavanagh Awards and third in RSPB/The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition. A Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee, she won The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, 2015. In a Hare’s Eye (Doire Press) is her first poetry collection.

Martin Dyar grew up in Swinford in County Mayo. His debut collection of poems, Maiden Names (Arlen House, 2013) was chosen as a book of the year in both the Guardian and The Irish Times, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Shine/Strong Award. His play, Tom Loves a Lord, about the life of the Irish poet Thomas Moore, toured nationally in 2011. He is presently completing a novel about a religious cult set in the West of Ireland. Martin won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2009, and the Strokestown International Poetry Award in 2001. He has also been a recipient of two Irish Arts Council Bursary Awards for literature. Most recently, he was a writer in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where he was a Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Fellow. Martin completed an MA in English at NUIG, and a PhD in English at Trinity College Dublin.