![]() ![]() Students and scholars of the Irish language came from far and wide to. She was born in the parish of Dunquin in Kerry and married into a neighbouring island, the Great Blasket, where she spent most of her life. There’s a great deal of pleasantry and hardship in the life of a person who lives on an island like this that no one knows about except one who has lived here - going to bed at night with little food and rising again at the first chirp of the sparrow, then harrowing away at the world and maybe having no life worth talking about after doing our very best. Peig Sayers was ‘the Queen, of Gaelic story-tellers’. “The most of my life I’ve spent on this lonely rock in the middle of the great sea. Other favourites: Anne Enright and Paula Meehan Phs s Pdraig Gaoithn n mBlascaod Mr, agus d'aistrigh s ansin leis. Thinig Peig Sayers ar an saol i nDn Chaoin, baile beag i gContae Chiarra, ire. Seancha agus drbheathaisnis ireannach ab ea Peig Sayers (1873 - 1958). ![]() Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves. Biographies & Memoirs, Philosophy, Short Stories. Peig Sayers: Labharfad Le Cch I Will Speak to You All. Though much of what she described was unrelenting hardship, she was, by all accounts, pragmatic and cheerful in the face of it. An Old Woman's Reflections: The Life of a Blasket Island Storyteller. Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. Peig Sayers: NÃl Deireadh Ráite / Not the Final Word No Binding Published by New Island Books, 2020. It doesn’t matter to me that she didn’t place her own words down on paper, for this is only one element in the process of writing. I didn’t study Peig in school I was not scarred by its misery at a tender age, which surely puts me in a more objective position than most to argue that Sayers’ account of life on the Great Blasket Island remains relevant and significant. There are plenty of arguments against the inclusion of Sayers in the canon of great Irish women writers, foremost being the fact that she was illiterate in the language she spoke and instead dictated her famously bleak biography, as well as the hundreds of folk stories she contributed to the Irish Folklore Commission. ![]()
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