Travel writer Dervla Murphy celebrated on Culture Night

By Paola Bassanese

Athlone Art Gallery and Athlone Bookshop organised a multimedia exhibition celebrating the life and works of Dervla Murphy on Culture Night, September 18.

The Athlone Art Gallery, nested within The Village at Burgess in the centre of Athlone, displayed pictures of Dervla Murphy’s Waterford home taken by Alastair Gray, who knew the writer through his mother.

You could see pictures of the house in Lismore, County Waterford, where Murphy lived until her passing, from the time when she took on the collapsing building and renovated it up to the present time. The house serves as a time capsule, with Dervla’s writing desk still as she left it. There are utensils and food containers in the kitchen, and I spotted a neat pile of stacked cat tinned food on a shelf. Dervla was very keen on cats and dogs, and she fed many of them who turned up at her door. There is also a picture of her beloved bike, Roz, resting against the walls of her local library. Murphy’s father was a librarian. The estate has been acquired by Waterford County Council, and it is hoped it may be turned into a museum or similar and a permanent collection of Murphy’s books and memorabilia.

Alastair Gray was granted permission to gain access to Dervla Murphy’s home in June 2026 to take some pictures, and the most memorable shot is of Murphy’s writing desk just as she left it, bathed in natural light from a large window.

Meanwhile, you could hear Dervla Murphy’s voice, from a collection of interviews, although she was very reluctant to be interviewed as she wasn’t keen on answering questions and narrating anecdotes from her travels. Murphy travelled mostly solo, sometimes on a bike, carrying only essentials and immersing herself in the daily life of locals.

Hard work or danger never deterred her from travelling and in her later years she was a passionate advocate for Palestine and Lebanon. She visited Palestine from 2008 to 2011, then narrated her experiences talking to both Palestinians and Israelis in her 2013 book ‘A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza’ and following it in 2015 with ‘Between River and Sea’.

Dervla Murphy’s most famous book is ‘Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle’, published in 1965, in which she described how she crossed from Ireland to India as a solo traveller on her bike. She wrote 26 travel books during her lifetime. Murphy’s editor Ethel Crowley gave the audience a summary of her life, courage and wit. Murphy enjoyed intelligent conversations and invited people to her home to have informal literary salons. She was not interested in simply chatting or exchanging pleasantries, you had to come prepared with topics of conversation if you wanted to be a guest in her home.