Walsh
Irish playwright and screenwriter Edna Walsh is set to speak at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts Nov. 15.
Walsh is set to discuss his Tony Award-winning play Once with Lewis Center chair Michael Cadden 4:30 p.m. Nov. 15 at the James M. Stewart ‘32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street.
Along with Once, Walsh will touch on his other theatrical and film work, including Disco Pigs, The Walworth Farce, Misterman and his screenplay for the Steve McQueen film Hunger.
Walsh shot to fame when he won both the George Devine Award and the Stewart Parker Award in 1997 for his breakthrough play Disco Pigs. Since then he has written several more widely produced and translated plays, including The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope. He is the author of five Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award-winning works.
His musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning film Once won eight Tony Awards in 2012, including Best Musical and Best Book for a Musical.
Walsh is also a screenwriter. He has adapted two of his plays for the screen. Hunger, co-written with director McQueen, tells the story of the final days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbender; it won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Heartbeat Award at the Dinard International Film Festival. Hunger was nominated for seven British Independent Film Awards, six British Film and Television Awards and BAFTA’s Outstanding British Film Award 2009.
Walsh is currently at work on three films, an adaptation of Eva Ibbotson’s children’s story Island of the Aunts, Jules in the City, based on the life and music of Rufus Wainwright and an adaptation of Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness, about the life of SS commandant Franz Stangl.
Cadden was appointed Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts in 2012 and is a senior lecturer in the center’s Program in Theater, which he directed for 19 years. He has been on the faculty at Princeton for over 30 years and in 1993 received the University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
This event is part of Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies, which is celebrating its 15th season.
More information is online at princeton.edu/arts.
