British Library to pay tribute to late poet Niall McDevitt as part of Irish Writers Weekend

The British Library will pay homage to the late Niall McDevitt, who died from cancer aged 55 in September and whose new collection, London Nation, returned from the printers the day he passed away, in time for him to hold a copy. 

As part of the British Library’s Irish Writers’ two-day festival from 26th to 27th November, McDevitt’s work will be presented by Nick McCluskey and read by Tam Dean Burn, Alan Cox and McDevitt’s son, Heathcote Ruthven.

London Nation is scheduled to be published posthumously on 16th November by New River Press.

In the collection, the publisher says, McDevitt returns from Jerusalem to London via Babylon in “Londonist, dissenting, occultist poems [that] take on as many forms as themes to reveal a linguistic shapeshifter in the Joycean vein”.

The publisher said: “London Nation is a fourfold work in a hardback edition with artwork by Julie Goldsmith, showing Thomas De Quincey with ‘Ann of Oxford Street’, who reputedly once saved the young De Quincey’s life.”

Iain Sinclair, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and John Cooper Clarke all admired his work and the literary walks McDevitt gave, which were billed as “psychogeographic investigations” and saw “greasy cafes and elite hotels alike as places of poetic pilgrimage”. Jeremy Reed, an older contemporary who influenced McDevitt’s early style, described him as “a luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries”.

McDevitt authored three previous collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013), and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He was poetry editor of International Times.