Celebrating 50 Years of Arlen House

We’re delighted to welcome back the Irish Literary Society to the Irish Cultural Centre. We also welcome Nuala O’Connor and Alan Hayes, representing Arlen House, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this pioneering press with a group of writers drawn from the latest in the Washing Windows series of poetry collections: Washing Windows V: Women Revolutionise Irish Poetry, 1975–2025, the largest anthology of Irish women poets ever published.

The night will also feature the London launch of O’Connor’s latest collection, Menagerie. Washing Windows V is the final volume in the series honouring the groundbreaking work of publishers Catherine Rose and Eavan Boland, Arlen House’s pioneering editors in the 1970s and 1980s.

The first Arlen House book came out in September 1975, the same month that Virago in London published their first book. The first Virago book was a gentle oral history of women in the Lake District while the first Arlen House was a radical exposé of women’s lives in 20th century Ireland and the controlling power of the Church. – Alan Hayes

Catherine Rose founded Arlen House, Ireland’s first feminist press, in Galway during the 1975 International Women’s Year. The press’s early work focused on championing women’s writing in Ireland, the first publication was Rose’s The Female Experience: The Story of the Woman Movement in Ireland, the work of Margaret Mac Curtain, Janet Martin, and Terry Prone featured and the Press revived the work of neglected writers such as such as Kate O’Brien and Norah Hoult. Since 1999 the extraordinarily prolific editor and publisher Alan Hayes has run the press.

The event will be followed by a book sale and signing.