ONE of Ireland’s greatest travel writers will be remembered and honoured this weekend in her home town, in a literary festival which will feature a number of Cork authors.
This year’s Immrama festival of travel writing launches tomorrow, two decades after its 2003 launch in Lismore in Co Waterford, and Cork authors Brian O’Donovan and Isabel Conway are featured guests.
This year the celebrations at Immrama will be marked by the remembrance of a native daughter who passed away last year.
Dervla Murphy was born in Lismore in 1931, the daughter of Dublin parents who had moved to West Waterford, so Fergus Murphy could take up his position as county librarian. She died in her Lismore home in May 2022, at the age of 90.
In her nine decades, Ms Murphy lived a remarkable life, becoming arguably most famous for her first book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965), in which she recounted her long-distance bicycle trip to India.
Setting out in 1963, and packing a pistol, along with other, less dramatically notable equipment, Ms Murphy went on an overland cycling trip across Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, through one of the worst winters on record.
Her book, which two years later became a bestseller, recalls her using her gun to dissuade a gang of thieves in Iran, and she wrote that in an Iranian police station she had used what she would only call “unprintable tactics” to escape an attempted rape.
Despite suffering serious injuries in an assault on an Afghanistan bus when a rifle butt broke three of her ribs, she fell in love with the country, declaring herself “Afghanatical”.
Over a career that lasted more than five decades, Ms Murphy wrote more than two dozen travel books, and in 2019 she received the Royal Geographical Society’s Ness Award for what it called “the popularisation of geography through travel literature”.
A lifelong humanitarian, she opposed globalisation and was critical of Nato, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, while condemning nuclear power and climate change.
Significantly, Ms Murphy never married, giving birth in 1968 to her daughter Rachel — to use the term of the day — “out of wedlock”, in the brutal and misogynistic Ireland of Magdalene laundries and mother and baby institutions.
She was dubious, to say the least, of some accolades, and when Lismore Town Council attempted to give her a civic reception in 2003, she declined, declaring “an allergy to such occasions”.
Ever graceful, she instead invited members of the council to call to her house for “a few beers and a chat on the future of Ireland”.
Ms Murphy is survived by her daughter Rachel and her three granddaughters.
Paying tribute, President Michael D Higgins said of Ms Murphy: “Her contribution to writing, and to travel writing in particular, had a unique commitment to the value of human experience in all its diversity.”
The Immrama festival, which began in 2003, was inspired, at least partially, by Ms Murphy’s love for her native town, an ancient place which has been a seat of learning for over a millennium.
Past speakers have included Michael Palin, who waived his fee in appreciation of his great friend Dervla Murphy, Christina Lamb, Paul Theroux, former Timoleague resident, the late Brendan Voyage author Tim Severin, and the late, renowned war correspondent Robert Fisk.
Others who have been guests at Immrama include such authors as Terry Waite, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Jung Chang, Colm Tóibín, Jan Morris, Jonathan Shackleton, Kate Adie, Brian Keenan, and Fergal Keane.
This year’s festival guests include Farran native, RTÉ’s Brian O’Donovan, former foreign correspondent with The Irish Times, Lara Marlowe, Botanical Gardens director Matthew Jebb, and award-winning Cork travel writer Isabel Conway.
A special Sunday morning presentation by Holocaust survivor and long-time Irish resident Tomi Reichental, author of I Was a Boy in Bergen Belsen, an event which had been anticipated as a highlight of the festival, has had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
The organisers of the festival have announced that an alternative talk with Lara Marlowe has been organised instead, and details, as well as refund arrangements, are available on the festival’s website.
Immrama runs from Thursday 15 to Sunday June 18. For further details, please see www.lismore-immrama.com.