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Celebrating the Literary Voices of County Leitrim

Discover authors, their stories, and the works inspired by this beautiful county.

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☘️ Leitrim’s Literary Legacy

This site is a space to explore the lives and works of authors from County Leitrim, and those who have written about it. Together, their writings offer a rich record of Leitrim’s people, places, and past — and help keep its stories alive. You’ll find author profiles, book lists, and links to where you can read or purchase their work. I’m also working to bring hard-to-find titles back into circulation and to help contemporary authors reach new readers. Whether you’re here to rediscover a forgotten voice or find someone new, céad míle fáilte.

📰 New & Noteworthy

Honouring Our Dead — A Question of Local History

We recently received a submission from Ken Boyle, a familiar contributor to Leitrim Books, that explores the complex and often painful history etched into the local landscape.

His article, “Honouring our Dead,” examines the physical legacy of three prominent South Leitrim memorials: the Selton Hill Monument, the McGirl Monument, and the recently unveiled Sheehan/Kelly Memorial. Through the lens of these three monuments, the author reflects on the region’s relationship with militant republicanism, the historical use of violence for political change, and how different eras of conflict are remembered today.

Before arriving at Leitrim Books, this piece was deemed unsuitable for Leitrim readers elsewhere. We believe our community is well-equipped to navigate the complexities of our shared past. We are publishing the piece in full, offering you the opportunity to read the article and make up your own mind.

To support open dialogue on this subject, we are also doing something new: for the very first time on Leitrim Books, we are opening a comments section at the bottom of the page. We welcome constructive remarks relevant to the article and invite you to share your perspective.

[Read “Honouring our Dead” here]

✒️ Three Selections from Emerging Leitrim Voice C. Day

Leitrim Books is pleased to feature three selections from a developing local poet, C. Day. Day’s poetry moves between outward simplicity and inward intensity, often using clear, accessible language to explore subjects that are anything but simple. His work returns repeatedly to questions of mortality, identity, and the uneasy relationship between the physical body and the imagination that inhabits it.

  • “After Death“: Here, the speaker is strikingly resistant to consolation, presenting death not as transformation or transcendence, but as something physical, definite, and unromantic.
  • “The cutout bird“: In this piece, the inner life becomes both vital and fragile, imagined as something alive within the self yet subject to scrutiny, removal, or loss.
  • “Daffodils“: Against these darker meditations, this poem turns toward nature and memory, but even here beauty is inseparable from decay, renewal, and the persistent cycles that shape both landscape and thought.

Though Day prefers to let his writing speak for itself, maintaining a quiet and anonymous presence off the page, his creative output is significant. The three featured pieces offer just a glimpse into his broader portfolio; they are drawn from his unpublished manuscript, The Collected Poems, which contains over a hundred original works. Currently, Day is expanding his literary repertoire and is actively at work on a collection of short stories.

While we wait for those future works to arrive, the verses featured today serve as a powerful introduction to his voice. Whether looking inward at the fragile self or outward at the natural world, Day rarely offers comfortable resolutions. Instead, these verses require the reader to sit with the uncomfortable realities of the human condition. Readers encountering C. Day’s work for the first time may find it contemplative, sometimes unsettling, but grounded in a consistent search for what it means to live inside a mind that cannot separate wonder from impermanence.

👤 Recently Added Authors

Our author list is always growing! Here are the three most recent additions connected to the county. Discover their stories and their work:

Spotlight on Authors

Joe Sheerin

Irish-born poet and educator Joe Sheerin explores the unvarnished realities of emigration and rural life with dark humor and striking realism.

Mary Guckian

Guckian is a poet from County Leitrim whose collections trace a life lived between the fields of Kiltoghert and the streets of Dublin.

Thomas M. O'Flynn

O’Flynn was a Leitrim-born teacher, historian, and poet best known for his enduring work History of Leitrim and his contributions to Irish cultural preservation.

“I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.”
— John McGahern

🔍 Explore Leitrim’s Literary Heritage

Start exploring the stories of Leitrim — through the voices of its writers and those who’ve written it into memory.

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