Award winning writer Ryan Dennis will be at Kennys Bookshop on January 23rd, joining Tomás Kenny in conversation about his new political memoir Barn Gothic.

Tickets for this event are free but are limited, and you can book below.

Ryan Dennis is the author of the novel The Beasts They Turned Away, longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. In 2020 he founded literary journal and press The Milk House, that features writing on rural subjects. In 2021-2022 Ryan was selected as a Writer-in-Residence at Maynooth University where he created and edited Voices from the Land, a collection of short stories, essays and poems by Irish farmers. He is also a syndicated columnist for agricultural print periodicals in four countries.

About Barn Gothic: 
When Ryan Dennis’s father was crushed by heavy machinery on their New York dairy farm, both men accepted the accident as a risk of agricultural life. But it was harder to comprehend being crushed by low milk prices, big banks, and the policies that destroyed America’s family farms.

Even though Ryan grew up watching his father and grandfather struggle to survive, he always thought he would follow in their footsteps and take over the family farm. But as he milked cows and fed calves, the world outside the barn was changing. Between 2003 and 2020, 40,000 dairy farms went out of business in the United States.

Barn Gothic is an elegy for family farmers and an intimate portrait of three generations laboring to be fathers and sons while their livelihood falls apart. Beautifully told with a farmer’s restraint and a poet’s grace, it is a story of personal loss amid corporate corruption and of finding a way forward when everything you know disappears.

Signed copies of the book will be available on the night, and are available to order here.

If you have any questions on this event or would like to be notified of other events at Kennys Bookshop, please email martha@kennys.ie.