Hunger Strike

Well-known novelists and poets, former prisoners and activists reflect upon the deaths of the ten republican hunger strikers who died in protest to gain political prisoner status from the British government in Northern Ireland. Their deaths proved a turning point in relations between Britain and Ireland in the early 1980s. Most of the pieces here were specifically commissioned, and while they differ greatly, what they have in common is a sense of the intensity of the experience of the hunger strike at the time, and the intensity of the impression made by it even now.