Links

• Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Haiku at The Davies Group publishers
• Irish Elegies at Palgrave Macmillan
• On the Shoreline of Knowledge at Sightline Books/Iowa University Press
• Words of the Grey Wind at Blackstaff Press
• Reading Life at Negative Capability Press
• Heidi Evans's interview with Chris Arthur (89 KB PDF) from the Swansea Review
• Robert Atwan, "The Top 10 Essays Since 1950", Publishers Weekly, October 12th 2012
• Julia Sukys's website, Writing Life: Reflections on creative nonfiction, biography, life-writing, and the personal essay
• Irish PEN
• International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
• Irish Pages
• The Irish Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition of William McKeown's work in 2008/9. This includes a series of watercolours entitled "Waiting for the Corncrake". The exhibition catalogue reprinted one of the essays from Irish Nocturnes, "The Last Corncrake".
• Quotidiana (kwo*ti*de*A*na) N. 1. The land of everyday, commonplace things; 2. The online compendium of 381 public-domain essays.
• Kostis Kourelis's Blog. Kourelis writes: "I have embraced Chris Arthur's mission statement, 'the strangeness that attends even the most mundane circumstances', in his essay '(En)trance' reprinted in The Best American Essays 2009". Kourelis is an architectural historian and archaeologist who teaches at Franklin and Marshall College. He applies some aspects of "(En)trance" to "objects-building-situations".
• "Ars Poetica and the Essay"
• Assay, a journal set up "to test and analyze the nonfiction texts we read".
• The Essay Review, the purpose of The Essay Review — an official University of Iowa publication — is "to recognize the poetic, academic, social, and existential achievements of the nonfiction essay".
• essaydaily.org, edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold, "is a space for ongoing conversation about essays & essayists of note."
• Chris Arthur’s page at the Royal literary Fund. This gives links to various podcasts, essays, interviews, and a short film for the RLF’s The Writer’s Talisman about a Japanese temple bell (subject of the essay “Substitute Psychometry” in Irish Nocturnes).
• Ohio State University Press's 21st Century Essays series
• “The Essay — Taking Ideas for a Walk”, University of Dundee conference on the essay, June 2018
• Chris Arthur reading from Hummingbirds between the Pages at the “Taking Ideas for a Walk” Conference
• “Zen and the Art of Chris Arthur”, Loretta Mulholland interviews Chris Arthur, plus a reading from Reading Life, Dundee University Review of the Arts, posted on June 20 2018
• “Imagined Spaces: Taking Ideas for a Walk” – a seminar on the essay sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh – 4th October 2019.
• “Views from the Bikeshed”, Mark Charlton’s blog on Words of the Grey Wind, July 31 2019. Mark’s book, Views for the Bike Shed, was published in 2023 by Cinnamon Press. The section on pp.195-198, “Interlude: The Blog as Essay”, makes reference to “Thirty-Six Ways of Looking at an Essay”, the afterword in Hummingbirds Between the Pages.
• Ricorso.net (“A large dataset of information about Irish writers and their works arranged in the form of a bio-bibliographical dictionary, with condensed biographies, lists of criticism and extracts from the works and commentaries upon them”). The entry for Chris Arthur needs to be updated. The bibliography stops in 2012 with On the Shoreline of Knowledge. Arthur’s date of birth is given incorrectly as 1940, and readers are directed to “See also Law and Marxism: A General Theory towards a critique of the fundamental juridical concepts, by Evgeny B. Pashukanis, trans. from German by Barbara Einhorn, ed. and intro. by Chris Arthur (London: Ink Links Ltd 1978).” This suggests that the Irish essayist has been confused with the identically named Marx Scholar, Christopher J Arthur (formerly of the University of Sussex), author of works such as The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel etc.

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"The personal essay in our time ... stays alive because it dares to be unique and because it strenuously resists the encroachments of standardization, whether social, cultural or academic."

Robert Atwan

"The culture administered by the universities has always regarded the essay with suspicion."

Susan Sontag