The Sligo Park Hotel will welcome Yeats enthusiasts from around Ireland and overseas when it hosts the 30th Yeats Winter School early next year.

The three-day programme of events celebrating the life and work of poet William Buter Yeats and his brother, the painter Jack Butler Yeats, will take place at the hotel from January 24-26, 2025.

The Yeats Winter School allows visitors the opportunity to learn more about W.B. Yeats and his family, by providing a basis for reading, exploring and thinking about Yeats’s poetry in the place where much of it began.

Attendance at the Yeats Winter School includes two nights’ bed and breakfast with dinner on one night and entertainment, from €279 per person sharing. There is an option of a third night B&B for an additional €69 per person sharing. It also includes full use of the leisure facilities.

Speakers at the 30th Yeats Winter School include:

• James Pethica, the Director of Yeats Winter School and a teacher of Irish Studies and Modernism at Williams College in Massachusetts, and the author of a number of books on W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. He is currently working on an authorised biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.
• Anne Margaret Daniel, a literature and humanities teacher at the New School University in New York City. A former Associate Director of the Yeats International Summer School, she has published work on a number of literary luminaries, from Oscar Wilde to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan. She is currently editing a collection of letters by Zelda Fitzgerald, the author and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Iggy McGovern, a poet and former lecturer in physics at Trinity College Dublin. Iggy is the author of three collections of poetry with Dedalus Press, including The King of Suburbia (2005), Safe House (2010), and The Eyes of Isaac Newton (2017). He is a former winner of The Hennessey Award for Poetry and The Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry.

Registration for the event opens at 7pm on Friday, January 24, followed by a welcome address and reading by Iggy McGovern at 8.30pm.

Saturday’s events begin at 9.30am with a lecture by James Pethica on Yeats, Lady Gregory and the first Abbey Theatre tour of the United States from 1911-1912. This will be followed at 11.15am by a lecture from Iggy McGovern which draws on McGovern’s 2019 book ‘Making Waves’, a sonnet sequence based on the life of Austrian Nobel Laureate and physicist Erwin Schrodinger.

On Saturday afternoon, a coach will take visitors from Sligo Park Hotel to Sligo town where they will savour “W.B. Yeats and Sligo” by the open fire with refreshments at the Yeats Building courtesy of the Yeats Society. They also have the option of visiting the Model Gallery on The Mall for ‘Salt Water Ballads’, an exhibition of work by Jack Butler Yeats. The group return to Sligo Park for dinner and a magical evening’s entertainment.

Sunday’s events begin at 10.30am with a lecture from Anne Margaret Daniel on the Yeats family’s adventures in the United States. This is then followed by a seminar by James Pethica on how Yeats drafted his poems. The event finishes at 12.30pm on Sunday afternoon.

Sligo Park Hotel General Manager Gerard Moore says: “We are delighted to welcome the Yeats Winter School back to Sligo Park Hotel for another weekend of relaxation, lectures, music, and a tour of Yeats Country. The Sligo Park first hosted this event 30 years ago and it is heartening to see that it continues to occupy a special place in Sligo’s cultural calendar all these years later.

“William and Jack Butler Yeats are icons of the arts in Ireland and internationally, and key figures in the identity of Sligo. The international make-up of our attendees is testament to their incredible impact in literature and visual arts around the world and I’m delighted that that the Sligo Park can facilitate this celebration of their lives and work.”

Visit Sligo Park Hotel’s website