S3E6: Colin Broderick - Searing Storyteller of the Irish
Colin Broderick likes to tell stories, needs to tell them, be they dark, dank, and dangerous, be they bright, affirming, and knowing.
It’s all there in his new film A Bend in the River, his highly personal tale of a writer returning to his native County Tyrone still in the shadows of “The Troubles,” confronting the life and loves he left behind and writing as if his life depended on it, with boxer-turned-actor John Duddy in the title role, and featuring Kathy Kiera Clarke of Derry Girls fame.
After Tyrone came New York, where Colin says he felt free for the first time, including the freedom to let alcohol and drugs take him to the dark side, unflinchingly related when we discuss his memoir of a drinker’s life, Orangutan, a story thankfully very much in Colin’s past.
And he got others to tell their Irish-American stories in The Writing Irish of New York, his just re-released curation of essays on the rise of Irish American writers with contributions from Irish Stew guest Peter Quinn, Colum McCann, Larry Kirwan, Malachy McCourt, Mary Pat Kelly, Dan Barry, Seamus Scanlon, John Kearns, Honor Molloy and more.
Join us for Colin’s very global Irish story, with its origins in England, its Northern Ireland narrative, and its tale of downfall and redemption in NYC.
Links:
Website: https://www.colinbroderick.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/colin_broderick
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Colin-Broderick-372018999547166
Film: A Bend in the River
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11C9W2inJQI
- Available on several platforms including Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Bend-River-John-Duddy/dp/B09FS14ZG8
Film: Emerald City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLtp6W9M0k&t=42
Colin Broderick
Author, Playwright, Filmmaker
COLIN BRODERICK was raised Irish Catholic in the heart of Northern Ireland. In 1988, at the age of twenty, he moved to the Bronx to drink, work construction, and pursue his dream of becoming a writer. For the next twenty years, as he drank himself into oblivion: there were failed marriages, car wrecks, hospitals and jail cells. Few people who have been a slave to an addiction as vicious, destructive, and unrelenting as Broderick’s have lived to tell their tale.
Broderick's most recent work includes, A Bend in the River, an exploration of lingering trauma. The film is set in County Tyrone, Broderick's Irish home locale and features actors John Duddy and Kathy Kiera Clarke along with beautiful cinematography by Shane Kelly
Broderick has also recently rereleased the Writing Irish of New York which contains a series of essays from some of the best contemporary Irish American talent writing on their literary life in America's greatest city
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