Lecture: Beckett & God by John Calder

John Calder published 23 Nobel Prize winners for Literature including Samuel Beckett. The Godot Company which he founded has toured Ireland with Waiting for Godot (2006), Endgame (2009), Beckett x3 (2010) which were acclaimed both by critics and by audiences.

Calder was Beckett’s principal English-language publisher during his lifetime, who was also a close friend, and has written one of the most enlightening books about him.

Samuel Beckett is probably the best-known, and most admired internationally, Irish author of the twentieth century, but much of his work is too little understood or considered not accessible to a wide general public. This should not to be so. Beckett’s work has universal appeal, and, although intended to help give an accurate picture of life as we know it and the realities of human destiny, it is also vastly entertaining, often very comic, and above all enlightening in what it tells us about how to make life better for others and more interesting for ourselves.

John Calder’s lecture will explain how this “God-haunted man” as he has been described, used his religious knowledge to help us understand the realities and the absurdities of our lives, make great literature out of it, always with great originality, humour and wisdom.

Every lecture will finish with a question and answer session.’