Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth – RTÉ Radio 1’s writing showcase returns with a stellar line-up of contemporary writers from Sunday 16th October 

Writers and actors contributing to the new series include Donal Ryan, Daryl McCormack, Belinda McKeon, Charlene McKenna, Billy O’Callaghan and Pat Shortt 

RTÉ Radio 1’s critically successful Spoken Stories returns with a brand-new 12-part series featuring some of the most exciting contemporary Irish and Irish-based writers on Sunday 16th October, 7.30pm. Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth, offers listeners a vast audio experience that examines the legacy of Irish independence with a contemporary twist.

Writers and actors contributing to the series include Donal Ryan, Daryl McCormack, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Emma Dargan-Reid, Lisa McInerney, Stephen O’Leary, Belinda McKeon, Charlene McKenna, Billy O’Callaghan, Pat Shortt, Louise O’Neill, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Colm Ó Ceallacháin, Evgeny Shtorn, Caoilinn Hughes and Louise Kennedy.

The stories take as their starting point the title of a story by celebrated author John McGahern, also the title of the final published collection of his stories in his lifetime. Complicated love, histories that bind us, family dynamics, personal freedoms, new beginnings and redemption are among their themes. Settings include a mobile home in a small level field at the edge of a small square of forestry; an all-girls boarding school in remote Australia, a subterranean cave nowhere in particular and a lakeside sauna in Finland.

RTÉ’s critically successful Spoken Stories 1: Independence first broadcast in 2021, considered through fiction what independence could mean a hundred years after Ireland’s War of Independence. John McGahern referred to himself as coming from the first generation born into independent Ireland.

In this way, Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth is a natural expansion on its predecessor. The series has been commissioned by RTÉ Arts and Culture with the support of BAI.

Ann- Marie Power, RTÉ Group Head of Arts and Culture says: “Commissioning new Irish fiction is an integral part of our strategy of working with artists, writers and performers on new work.  and, Spoken Stories on RTE Radio 1 is a vital and exciting programming strand bringing such new fiction to audiences everywhere.  Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth taking its theme from a John McGahern story creates a direct link between our vital present-day writers and an Irish literary giant featuring a host of talented Irish performers and writing, emerging and established. RTÉ Arts and Culture is delighted to offer a second Spoken Stories series once more with the support of the BAI.” 

Spoken Stories Producer Clíodhna Ní Anluain, comments: “it is fascinating when having commissioned writers to begin out from a common thought, their stories arrive in so various and different from one another in shape, in tone, in intention and in how they linger in the mind. Then as these stories are read aloud how another layer of imagination is added by the actors and revealed to us as listeners.’” 

Writer Lisa McInerney, who contributes to the series adds: “What I react to in John McGahern’s stories, like those in Creatures of the Earth, is the sense of fullness in the Irish everyday by which I mean the good, the bad and the ugly, specifically McGahern’s recognition of the kind of brusque horror, what was hopeless and inevitable and cyclical which adds to a sense of mythic to the mundane. With ‘Law of the Instrument’ [my story], I wanted to speak to that sense of bitter drama, a sort of eternal battle between self and soil and family. Here a young man has dug his heels into an incessant conflict with his father, stopping himself from leaving because he is so committed to that conflict.”  

Tune in to the new series of Spoken Stories from Sunday 16th October at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1.