Patricia Burke Brogan is a painter, poet and playwright. Her etchings have won awards at Barcelona and at Listowel International Biennale 1982. Above the Waves Calligraphy, her collection of poems and etchings was published by Salmon in 1994 and the script of her stage play, Eclipsed, was published by Wordsonthestreet in 2008. Eclipsed has won many awards including a Fringe First at Edinburgh Theatre Festival 1992 and the USA Moss Hart Award 1994. To date there have been well over one-hundred productions of the play on three continents. Eclipsed has been excerpted in documentaries and other collected works including The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 and 5, and Irish Women Playwrights of the Twentieth Century. The USA premiere of Stained Glass at Samhain was presented in Denver, Colorado in 2013. Requiem of Love, a monologue, was premiered at Galway's Town Hall Theatre in 2005. Eclipsed has been translated into Italian, French, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish and Gaelic. Stained Glass at Samhain has been translated into Italian.

A memoir by the author of the widely acclaimed play Eclipsed, the story that first uncovered the treatment of women in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries.

As a young novice Patricia Burke Brogan witnessed the treatment of women in one of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. She told that story in her widely-acclaimed plays Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain.

Her memoir is a poetic account of the grykes and turloughs of her life experiences, from growing up in country villages, to boarding school, teacher training college, entering the novitiate, marriage, and her artistic life as a poet, playwright and visual artist.

For her presence so long before Galway's contemporary artistic reputation was established, her work right through it in such an integrative way, with the visual, the aural, lyrical and the dramatic, for her seeking excellence and sharing it, as artist, teacher and sensitive human being, it is appropriate that we pay tribute to Patricia Burke-Brogan — and I with many are grateful to her and may the onward march of her curiosity and achievement in the arts continue.

                                          Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland

Astounding, compassionate, and absolutely riveting. If you read one memoir this year, pray it is this. Uplifting and grace laden.

                                                  Ken Bruen author of The Guards

Patricia Burke's continual request for new and challenging forms of expression … shows a great trust in the unknown and a fierce unwillingness to settle for what is complacent or successful. She submits the depths of her individuality to the full rigours of art exploration.

                                          John O’Donohue author of Anam Cara

Memoir with Grykes & Turloughs

a memoir by playwright, poet, painter and author of Eclipsed Patricia Burke Brogan.

RRP €18-00. 300 pp. Illustrated

ISBN 9781907017292