Virtual Crossways 2021
Welcome To The Third Annual Crossways: The Irish Scottish Cultural & Literary Festival
The first two highly successful Crossways Festivals took place in the Merchant City, Glasgow, in the spring of 2018 and 2019.
Due to the ongoing Pandemic, this year’s Festival must be a virtual one. Although online, Virtual Crossways 2021 will nonetheless be a substantial series of events in its own right, with a particular focus this year on Irish-language and Scottish Gaelic writing.
There will be 15 literary readings and three musical events being streamed on this website over the weekend of 12-14 February 2021. Each approximately one-hour reading will pair one writer from Ireland and one from Scotland. The full programme can be seen under Events on the Virtual Crossways 2021 website.
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Virtual Crossways 2021 follows on from the highly successful Crossways Festivals pf 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow which featured acclaimed writers and performers in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English.
The particular aim of Crossways continues to be to foster and expand the rather weak literary links across the North Channel. It will again bring together notable Irish writers – from both North and South – together with their Scottish peers, in a well-planned and well-balanced Festival underscoring the longstanding contribution of Irish people, history, language, culture and writing to both Glasgow and the Scottish nation.
In the view of Irish Pages, such a forum for Irish, Irish-Scottish and Scottish cultural and literary interaction, dialogue and debate of real distinction and diversity is long overdue. To a considerable extent, the North of Ireland (especially) and Scotland are highly separated and self-contained on many levels, but especially in cultural and literary terms – divided, precisely, by Partition and so (ironically) by the United Kingdom itself, with a consequent focus on London from each of the jurisdictions, rather than on interchange across the narrow North Channel. The two literary cultures, as it were, have their backs to each other to a surprising degree. Thus, the Festival will aim at lessening this contemporarycultural distance, and at a new historical moment – where relations between the two islands, no less than between the parts of the United Kingdom, have already begun to change dramatically with Brexit.
Virtual Crossways 2021 is sponsored and organized by Irish Pages/Duillí Éireann. It receives financial support from the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme, Foras na Gaeilge, Colmcille, and Bòrd na Gàidhlig.