For Culture Night 2025 on Friday, September 19th, RTÉ Culture will be edited for the day by novelist, short story writer and playwright Belinda McKeon, who has curated a selection of choice cultural content for the day, from poetry and prose by emerging talent to a celebration of the late, great Sean Rocks, host of Arena on RTÉ Radio 1.
Belinda McKeon is the author of the novels Solace (2011) and Tender (2015), and has had short fiction and non-fiction published in The Paris Review, Granta, Winter Papers, A Public Space, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, most recently at the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival, with Nora (Corn Exchange). She directs the new MA in Creative Writing at Maynooth University.
Belinda introduces her Culture Night selections below - they'll be published on RTÉ Culture over the duration of Friday, September 19th.
I was walking on the beach in Louth the evening of the Arena tribute to Séan Rocks, whose death had been announced that morning. I had the airpods in as I usually do on that evening walk: one last time with Sean's Arena as my companion.
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It was a beautiful tribute - the voices of so many artists whose work Séan Rocks had unpacked and expanded upon and shared during so many episodes. Afterwards, the first song played by John Creedon on his 8pm show was Van Morrison's Into The Mystic. It seemed like a tribute in itself. All those years of bringing us somewhere unexpected and enriching every night. Let your soul and spirit fly / into the mystic.
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For Culture Night, I spent some time going through the Arena archives on rte.ie, which are an amazing resource. So many interviews, discussions, excerpts, in session recordings; an audio journal of where the arts have been over the past decade and a half, but also of where life has been, and of where artists can take us. I could have chosen hundreds of excerpts to weave into a mix: I've chosen just a small selection of some things - readings, conversations, tunes moments in time - that speak to me, and that I hope will speak to you, too, on this September shore. I've also asked three writers - the novelist Patrick Doherty and the poets Róisín Leggett Bohan and Rafael Mendes - to give us a piece of work which taps into that idea of heading into the mystic in some way, as a tribute to Séan, but also as a way to remind ourselves that the work, the beautiful, mystical work, is always being done.
Find out more about this year's Culture Night celebrations on RTÉ here
