Nicholas Allen is Baldwin Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Willson Center at the University of Georgia. He has written and edited many books about Irish literature. His text here was written to accompany the installation In Search of Hy-Brasil, a project curated by a team of five architects, Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen and Joseph Mackey. It presents fieldwork from Ireland's remote islands, investigating their diverse cultures, communities, and experiences, and was Ireland's contribution to the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennale.

Julian Bell has been a self-employed painter throughout his adult life, working on pub signs, murals, portraits alongside the narrative, panoramic compositions that have dominated his exhibitions. Since the 1990s, he has also been teaching (Goldsmiths', City & Guilds of London Art School, Camberwell) and writing about art for journals including London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. In 1999 Thames & Hudson published his What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art and in 2007, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. His most recent book, Natural Light: The Art of Adam Elsheimer and the Dawn of Modern Science (2023), provides a brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in the work of the overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer.

John Brannigan is a Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. His many publications include Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (2015) and most recently A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose (2023).

Moya Cannon was born in Co. Donegal and lives in Dublin. Her Collected Poems came out from Carcanet in 2021. A Clutag Press pamphlet Caught was published in 2022.

Seán Farrell was born and brought up in the Irish midlands. After graduating from Cambridge University, he spent fifteen years in France working as a farm labourer, in Burgundy. As well as writing, he works as a freelance editor for publishers and private clients. He lives in Sligo with his wife, the novelist Elske Rahill, and their four children. His debut novel Frogs for Watchdogs was published by New Island Books earlier this year.

David Gange teaches history at the University of Birmingham and is celebrated for his kayaking adventures made to explore and investigate the histories of coastal and island communities along the Atlantic coasts of the archipelagos of Britain and Ireland. His essay ‘The Archive of the Oar’, published in Archipelago 2:2 provides fascinating insight into his approach, as does the present essay here. He is best known and widely celebrated for his book The Frayed Atlantic Edge (2019).

Vona Groarke was born in Mostrim in the Irish midlands and is one of Ireland’s leading poets,  currently completing her ninth collection. Amongst her latest are Woman of Winter (2023), a re-framing of the ninth-century Irish poem ‘Lament for the Hag of Beare’, and Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (2022), focusing on the lives of Irish domestic servants in nineteenth-century New York. Editor, reviewer, teacher and essayist, she was a Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library 2018–19, and is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Jason Hicklin was born in Wolverhampton and studied at St Martin’s College of Art where he was a student of Norman Ackroyd. After completing a postgraduate course at the Central School of Art in 1991, he combined working as Ackroyd’s studio assistant and editioner with producing his own work. As may be seen in these pages his etchings (as do his paintings) capture the feel of the weather and its effect on the landscape. He is a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and down the years has received numerous prestigious awards. The work reproduced here formed part of a show at the Eames Gallery on Bermondsey this year.

James Macdonald Lockhart has long been a vital contributor to Archipelago as both author and talent-spotter. His most recent book, Wild Air: In Search of Birdsong (2023) was preceded by the award-winning Raptor (2016).

Garry MacKenzie’s forthcoming book Firth is due out from Irish Pages Press this summer. His celebrated Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain (2021) was followed by two Clutag Press pamphlets: ring-net and Three Ways of Looking at the Forth.

Andrew McNeillie is the founding editor (and publisher) of the journal Archipelago. His Striking a Match in a Storm: New and Collected Poems came out in 2022. A memoir News of the World was published in March this year.

Bernard O’Donoghue’s long-awaited new book of poems The Anchorage is out this year. His exacting work to edit the Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney continues to progress towards publication.

Lillis Ó Laoire, from Gort A' Choirce, Co. Donegal, is emeritus professor of Irish at Ollscoil na Gaillimhe/University of Galway. Ar Chreag i Lár na Farraige: Amhráin agus Amhránaithe i dToraigh appeared in 2002 (Cló Iar-Chonnacht), and a revised translation On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island, was published in a double printing (2005 and 2007). Also a singer, he achieved the TG4 Gradam Ceoil Amhránaí na Bliana (Singer of the Year) in 2020. With Sean Williams, he wrote Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man (2011). His latest book, edited with Philip Fogarty and Tiber Falzett, Dhá Leagan Déag: Aistí Nua ar an Sean-nós, is a multi-authored volume of essays in Irish and Scottish Gaelic on traditional Gaelic singing in Ireland, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada (2022). Readers are encouraged to read his introduction to Homecoming /An bealach ‘na bhaile (1993) by Cathal Ó Searcaigh; and the essays ‘Murder in a Meadow: Environmental and Cultural Extinction in Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s “Scrúdú Coinsiasa Roimh Dhul Chun Suain”’ in From Ego to Eco. Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism (2018) edited by Sabine Lenore Müller and Tina-Karen Pusse.

John Purser was born in Glasgow of Irish parents, descended from a celebrated Dublin dynasty of eminent scholars in numerous professions and spheres of activity, and including the painter Sarah Purser. He is a composer, writer, musicologist and scholar of Gaelic, associated with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, where he lives and crofts at Drinan, near Mount Elgol. Recent among his many publications and productions is the invaluable online resource Window on the West – Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhhealtachd, co-authored with Meg Bateman.

Alan Riach is Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. As readers will know he is a mainstay of Archipelago. His The MacDiarmid Referendum, a collection of poems, accompanied by Alexander Moffat and Ruth Nicol, came out in 2023. He is editor of the ongoing edition of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid. His English-language version of Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s Praise of Ben Dorain was published in 2012, and his tour-de-force Scottish Literature: An Introduction came out in 2022.

Fiona Stafford is Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Among the more recent of her many publications is Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape (2024).

Gerard Walshe is a part-time farmer in Moycullen, Co. Galway. He keeps a herd of Belted Galloway cattle. His ancestors have farmed the land there for over two-hundred years. In 2019 he was awarded a ‘Farming for Nature’ ambassadorship for his work with, and advocating for, farming and nature.