The John Hewitt International Summer School: Why its 38th Year Might Be its Most Meaningful Yet
By Chloë McCollum
The John Hewitt Society and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland invited participants to engage in a range of critical conversations and workshops for the 38th annual John Hewitt Society International Summer School, held in Armagh. Honouring the legacy of Belfast poet, writer, and thinker, John Hewitt, this year’s festival of literature, the arts, and ideas interrogated the theme of ‘Our Country Also: Difference and Belonging’, words taken from Hewitt’s 1949 work, The Colony.
Rooting this year’s theme of continuity, change, and belonging in recent and current history, was the guest speaker Professor Peter Shirlow FAcSS, Head of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool. Professor Shirlow, the first speaker of the week, considered in a statistical take, the question of ‘Northern Ireland is finished?’ drawing on his experience of challenging sectarianism, social injustice and racism. Not only thought provoking in his argument, Shirlow detailed how the wider picture of Northern Ireland needs to be examined to answer such a question, as the evolving identity of the country can sometimes be misrepresented in the media.
Building on this was Takura Donald Makoni, Policy Director of ACSONI (African and Caribbean Support Organisation Northern Ireland). Makoni explored the meaning of the word ‘integration’, placing it in the context of government, communities, and post-Troubles Northern Ireland. Makoni spoke from personal experience of moving to Northern Ireland from Zimbabwe, arriving in a country which felt just as divided as his own. He pushed attendees to examine assumptions about nationhood and cultural identity asking, is Northern Ireland an integrated society? Are we hostile to each other, just as much as to newcomers, even today?
While the week-long programme of events supported emerging writers through creative writing workshops, poetry readings, and interviews with fiction writers like Wendy Erskine and Donal Ryan, a panel discussion dedicated to the festival’s theme was a standout event in the impressive lineup. Hosted by writer and broadcaster Malachi O’Doherty, the conversation was captivating and at times heated. The panel included Lata Sharma, of Indian heritage but born and raised in Northern Ireland, who works for the BBC and U105. Alongside Sharma was David Adams, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as well as humanitarian relations internationally with Dublin-based organisation GOAL. Finally, Aleksandra Łojek was also on the panel: she was born in Poland but has been living in NI since 2008. Belfast based, she works as a writer, translator, and mediator, involved in action against hate crimes in minority communities.
At the heart of the Society and the festival is the aim to acknowledge and promote an understanding of Hewitt’s ethos of “utilising literature and the arts as a medium for tackling prejudice, exclusive concepts of identity, and sectarian hostility towards the ‘other’” [1]. These objectives are as valued today as they were by Hewitt, and this year’s festival brought the poet’s vision into the present, recognising the plurality of country, identity, home, and belonging; none are fixed, rather they are emergent; things to be celebrated.
That said, the John Hewitt International Summer School is not a nostalgic enterprise; looking unflinchingly at the terrain we’ve inherited, it seeks to ask what imaginative futures we can build. In doing so, it brings Belfast’s literary inheritance into direct conversation with a wider and more inclusive sense of ‘country’.
Hewitt’s line, ‘This is our country also, nowhere else; and we shall not be outcast on the world’, from The Colony, from which the theme was derived, is both a declaration and a plea. Capturing the dilemma of belonging in a place like Northern Ireland where identity is layered, contested, and changing, it seemed a poignant choice for the focal point of the programme of events, with clear contemporary resonance in the literary and cultural scene of today.
By choosing to host the event in Armagh, the JHISS symbolically stepped outside Belfast’s gravitational pull. Yet, Belfast was never absent and many of the featured artists and speakers hail from or are deeply influenced by the city, including voices shaped by post Agreement Belfast: diverse, creative, and still grappling with legacies of exclusion and identity. The tribute to Michael Longley, led by Dr. Florence Impens and Gail McConnell, was a particularly moving moment.
Attending this year’s Summer School invited me to consider the creative world that Ireland, North and South, represents. The thematic lens of ‘difference and belonging’ shone a spotlight on literature’s importance in cultural differences and integration, a theme which is especially resonant today. The voice of John Hewitt remains vital not because he provided answers, but because he asked questions, about language, history, identity, values, and the possibility of shared ground.
Sources:
[1] The John Hewitt Society. 2025. https://johnhewittsociety.org/about-the-john-hewitt-society/
