David’s interest in the French Nouveau Roman fuses with a story of travel and migration over twenty years; moving between Ireland, England and Scotland, Stretto is an exploration of the nature of self and of reality. Come along to hear David talk about and read from this novel, which Kirsty Gunn has described as ‘Wondrous.’

 

In Stretto, David Wheatley’s first novel, a stained-glass window in a country church offers a portal of light in the darkness, and the narrator follows wherever it leads. Reconnecting with the modernist energies of Joyce and Beckett, Stretto is a radical and audacious debut novel.

 

‘David Wheatley has composed a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes. Each section is a bar of poetry both fitted within and overlaying the prose that describes it; each page and a half is measured to sing out exactly in the key and time signature to which it has been set. Wondrous.’

– Kirsty Gunn on Stretto.

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David Wheatley (born 1970) is an Irish poet and critic. He was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. Wheatley is the author of four volumes of poetry with Gallery Press, as well as several chapbooks. He has also edited the work of James Clarence Mangan, and features in the Bloodaxe anthology, The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005), and the Wake Forest Irish Poetry Series Vol. 1 (Wake Forest UP, 2005). He teaches at the University of Aberdeen, having previously taught at Hull. He has been shortlisted twice for the Poetry Now Award (2007, 2018), and was awarded The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, in 2008.

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