Vision and Voices: Theatre and Song
Shaun Byrne’s new memory play As I Lay Dreaming, and jazz singer Emilie Conway responding in song and spoken word to Frances Browne’s life and work.
Date Sunday 11 October 2026 Time 8.00pm
Venue Balor Arts Centre, Ballybofey, Co. Donegal
Ticket price €15 / €12 unwaged
Emilie Conway and Graeme Bourke
Jazz singer Emilie Conway responds in song and spoken word to Frances Browne’s life and work, in an unmissable musical soirée.
Combining singing, spoken word and music, Emilie shares her responses to Frances Browne’s story and legacy, and reflects on her own creative journey as an artist with a visual impairment. Rather than a formal lecture, this year we honour Frances Browne by offering audiences an encounter with an artist whose life and work in 2026 resonate with much of what Frances lived through.
Emilie combines performance with activism, giving insights into her own practice and into the situation of disabled artists at home and abroad. Thanks to an Arts Council Agility Award, she has been supporting playwright Shirley-Anne Bonner in developing her representation of Frances Browne in the play In My Mind’s Eye from a disability perspective, and the two hope to make that play accessible to visually impaired audiences.
Graeme Bourke, originally from Sligo, accompanies Emilie on piano and is one to watch among Ireland’s up and coming jazz pianists.
Who knows how Frances will inspire Emilie? This is a truly special event.
Emilie Conway’s work with Shirley-Anne Bonner is supported by an Arts Council Agility Award.
About Emilie
Emilie Conway is an award-winning Dublin-based vocal jazz artist, composer and lyricist, weaving together jazz standards, original composition, spoken word and improvisation. A prominent disability rights activist and founder of DADA, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, the National Concert Hall and Copenhagen Jazz Festival.
Sponsors
Festival sponsors: Donegal County Council and the Finn Valley Voice.
About the Frances Browne Literary Festival
The Frances Browne Literary Festival celebrates the life and legacy of Frances Browne (1816 to 1879), the "Blind Poetess of Ulster". Rooted in her hometown of Ballybofey-Stranorlar, Co. Donegal, the festival brings together poets, writers, musicians and communities from Ireland and beyond to share in her spirit of creativity, inclusion and multilingual expression.
Frances Browne is the most important writer to emerge from Donegal’s Finn Valley. Her masterpiece, the children’s storybook Granny’s Wonderful Chair, was a bestseller all over the world, but she also deserves to be remembered for her unswerving opposition to slavery and all sorts of injustice. The festival works to bring Frances’s writing and astonishing life story to new generations, and to celebrate contemporary writers who continue in her tradition.
Full programme and festival information: www.francesbrowneliteraryfestival.com