Life
1970- [Selina Karen Elizabeth Guinness]; b. Dublin, dg. Paul Guinness, Sol.; ed. TCD & Oxford; raised at Tibradden House, Rathfarnham, after her parents’s amicable separation [aetat. 11]; ed. St. Columba’s College; visited Budapest in the early 1990s at the time of the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina (Croatian War); completed a doctorate in Yeatsian/literary-revival studies (Oxford U); lectures in Irish Literature at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology; has served as dir. the DLR International Poetry Festival; issued The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe 2004), an anthology;
settled in Tibradden House, with her partner Colin Graham, a lect. at NUI Maynooth - to whom later m., with 2 sons; acquired Tibradden House through a family trust on the death of her uncle Charles Guinness - the house being the setting of her memoir The Crocodile by the Door (2012), launched by Harry Clifden at the Guinness Store and nominated for the Costa Award and the Irish Book and the Newcomer of the Year wards; maintains Tibradden as a sheep-farm and a listed house, partly open to visitors;
[ top ]
WorksMemoir, The Crocodile by the Door: The Story of a House, a Farm and a Family (Penguin Ireland 2012; London: Penguin Books 2013), 246pp. Editions, co.-ed. with Jared Curtis, The Resurrection: Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats [The Cornell Yeats] (Cornell UP 2011), xlvii, 581pp., ill. Ed., The New Irish Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe 2004), 336pp., ill. [ports.; incls. Vona Groarke, Sinead Morrissey, and Maurice Riordan, et al.] Miscellaneous, ‘The Universal Soldier’, in The Dublin Review, 36 (Autumn 2009) - being an account of the author’s time in Budapest and her acquaintance with a pro-Croatian family in the form of a memoir triggered by the death of Michael Dwyer, an Irishman killed identified as an associate of terrorists and killed in a hotel raid a pro-Government squad in Bolivian. The epigraph is from Ryszard Kapucinkski. (See online; accessed 15.11.2012.) |
[ top ]
Kith & Kin: Lineally descended from Arthur Guinness, through his son Hosea Guinness. The Peerage lists Owen Charles Guinness, son of Charles Davis Guinnness, and Hon. Lucy Matilde Ann Massy, who went to school at Uppingham [public school], and was severely wounded in WWI, serving as Major in the Worcestershire Regt. after training at Sandhurst; received OBE in 1919; taught at Sandhurst, 1938-32; resided at Tibradden and St. Thomas, Co. Dublin, Ireland. He was married to Katherine Doris [née] Smith-Ryland, dg. of William Charles Henry Alston Smith-Ryland, J.P., Barford Hill, Warwickshire, with children Charles Spencer Guinness (1932-2004) and Paul Dennis Guinness (1941- ). Citation: Burke’s Peerage 107th edn. [See online.]
Kith & Kin: Colin Graham (1967- ) was born and ed. in Belfast (QUB), taught at Huddersfield University, QUB and currently teaches Irish literature and Potcolonial studies NUI Maynooth. He is the author of Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh UP 2001) and editor, with Leon Litvack, of Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century [Nineteenth-century Ireland Ser., 10 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006), 224pp., ill.
[ top ]