The Sligo Park Hotel is celebrating its successful hosting of the 28th Yeats Winter School in association with the Yeats Society Sligo after a two-year hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A capacity attendance of William Butler Yeats enthusiasts from across the country and overseas visited Sligo’s top-rated hotel on TripAdvisor at the weekend (January 27th-29th). The event featured lectures from prominent academics, informal gatherings and a tour of Yeats Country.

The Yeats Winter School is designed to allow the visitor the opportunity to learn more about W.B. Yeats and his family against the backdrop of the places which inspired them. The aim of the weekend is to provide a basis for reading, exploring and thinking about Yeats’s poetry and his brother’s paintings in the place where much of it began.

Speakers included:

• Yeats Winter School Director James Pethica, who teaches Irish Studies and Modernism at Williams College in Massachusetts and is currently working on the authorised biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.
• Irish poet and Aosdána member Moya Cannon, in whose poems history, archaeology, pre-historic art, geology and music figure as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and with our past.
• Anne Margaret Daniel, who teaches literature and humanities at the New School University in New York and has written on topics from Oscar Wilde's trials to F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Bob Dylan and contemporary music.

Attendees also had the opportunity to tour the Yeats Society’s new exhibition about the influences and inspirations in the life of Yeats, ‘The Poetic Mind of WB Yeats’, and to visit the ‘Century’ exhibition at the Model which features more than 100 artworks in a salon-style installation and explores over 100 years of Irish social and political life.

General Manager of the Sligo Park Hotel Gerard Moore was delighted with the success of the Yeats Winter School, which the hotel first organised almost 30 years ago. He said:

“We’re delighted to have been able to organise the Yeats Winter School as an in-person event after a gap of two years. There’s no better place to host such an event than Sligo, a county that left an indelible imprint on the writings of William Butler Yeats and the paintings of Jack Butler Yeats.

“When we first organised this event 30 years ago, it was with the intention of providing a forum for Yeats enthusiasts, leading academics and authors to share their knowledge and appreciation of the achievement of the Yeats brothers and their wider family. It pleases us greatly that the Winter School has been so warmly received for 28 years and counting.”