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Bernard MacLaverty: An Irish Writer Reading at our School

	It's Thursday afternoon, 13 November 2008, and we have the great pleasure to welcome the famous Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty at our school. How did this event come about? I met Bernard MacLaverty while doing a course at the Stanza Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland in March 2007. So I grabbed the opportunity to invite him to come to Switzerland and talk to students and teachers at some Swiss schools about his writing and his work.
	So here he is, standing in our lecture room in front of a hundred 4th to 6th year English students and teachers, all eager to hear him read from his stories. His main topic is the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which dominate a lot of his writing. He talks about his hometown Belfast in the 1970s and 80s, about the terrible situation of murder, hatred, fear and destruction. He tells us about his personal experiences living there before moving to Glasgow with his family, illustrating this agonizing reality with extracts from some of his stories.
	The seriousness of the topic and the captivating tone in which he reads to us give way to a lighter atmosphere when students have the chance to ask questions. In his answers he lets us share his private life and thoughts and his Irish humour. The event ends with an aperitif, sponsored by the school, during which students and teachers use the opportunity to get to know him at bit more personally.
	We would like to thank the following for their financial contribution and organisational support: Dr. Max Ziegler, headmaster SATE (Swiss Association of Teachers of English) Markus Diedrich with his team, caterer school cafeteria Brigitte Brun, English Department

Bernard MacLaverty: A Short Biography
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942 and lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife and four children. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician, a teacher of English and Creative Writing, and, for two years in the mid eighties, he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Aberdeen.
After living for a time in Edinburgh and the Isle of Islay he now lives in Glasgow. He is a member of Aosdana (an association supporting artists in Ireland) and is Visiting Writer / Professor at the University of Aberdeen.
He has published four novels: Lamb, Cal, The Anatomy School and Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. He has written five acclaimed collections of short stories, the most recent of which is Matters of Life & Death. He has also written versions of his fiction for other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays, a 15-minute-opera and the short film Bye-Child, which is based on a Seamus Heaney poem.
For more information see also www.bernardmaclaverty.com