One for the Records: Remembering Bloomsday 2012 

In anticipation of this year’s Bloomsday celebrations – kicking off this Friday in venues across Dublin City – we at the Irish Writers Centre are looking back on a very special day in our building’s history.  

Guinness Book of World Records Certificate 2012

Text reads: “The most authors reading consecutively is 111 at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin , Ireland on 15-16 June 2012. The 111 writers read from their work in slots of 15 minutes each over 28 continuous hours before an aggregate audience of 1280.”

On the 16th June 2012, in celebration of the Irish Writers Centre’s 25th anniversary, we were delighted to play host to a Guinness World Record-setting event. The event, which began at 10am on Friday the 15th and ended at 2pm the following day, constituted a new world record for the most amount of writers to read consecutively from their work, breaking the previous record set at the Berlin International Literature Festival a few years previously where 75 writers participated.  

In total, 111 writers took to the Irish Writers Centre’s stage over the course of a twenty-eight hour period. Participants were given a slot of fifteen minutes each and were instructed to read from a work with a verified ISBN. While the entire event was streamed live over the Internet, in-person spectators were welcome to come and go throughout the night, joining an audience of IWC board members, representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records, and a team of eagle-eyed invigilators from KPMG and the American University of Ireland who were there to keep time and mark attendance as the hours passed by.  

Kicking off the festivities at 10am was Senator David Norris with an introductory address. John Boyne, reading from his 2011 novel The Absolutist, was the first writer up on the podium. Mike McCormack, Evelyn Conlon, Kevin Barry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáinn, Mia Gallagher, Dermot Bolger, Peter Sirr and Nobel Laureate for Literature Seamus Heaney were among those who followed. Roddy Doyle, who was second-last to perform, described the evening in the Irish Times as “a great event. The surprise is that everybody turned up on time, given the reliability of Irish writers.”  

The final slot was reserved for author and Irish Writers Centre founder Jack Harte, who read from his 2004 collection From Under Gogol’s Nose. Jack, who was central to the planning and organiszation of the event, was soon to retire from the IWC Board after twenty-five years of service to the Centre. To acknowledge and celebrate Jack’s valuable contributions to Irish literature and the Irish Writers Centre an annual bursary award is named in honour of Jack, offering a professional writer a one-week Writer-in-Residence Bursary in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. 

A full list of participating writers can be accessed here.