Nadine O’Regan is Books and Arts Editor with the Sunday Business Post and a columnist and a feature writer with the same newspaper. Nadine has won two Irish Radio Awards for her music programme Songs in the Key of Life, which ran on Dublin station TXFM and later Today FM.  She will be hosting a panel event called My Roots Are Showing as part of the Festival of Politics and Near FM’s Norma Burke caught up with her to find out more about it.

In this panel discussion,  Nadine O’Regan will be joined by three writers and performers — Darren McGarvey, Emmet Kirwan and Mango — who use their roots as inspiration for their creative work, writing about hard-hitting issues and difficult truths.

Scottish rapper and writer Darren McGarvey (aka Loki The Scottish Rapper) recently won the prestigious Orwell Prize for his memoir Poverty Safari, a blistering study of deprivation. A rapper-in-residence at Police Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit, McGarvey is described by Irvine Welsh as “an intellectual and spiritual rehab manual for the progressive left”.

Irish rapper and poet Mango, meanwhile, has played to rapturous receptions at festivals from Forbidden Fruit to Electric Picnic alongside his producer/collaborator Mathman. Having first come to prominence as a member of hip-hop group The Animators, Mango is a rapidly rising artist praised for his machine gun vocal delivery, biting lyrics and proudly strong Dublin accent.

Emmet Kirwan is an Irish performance poet, actor and writer, whose phrase ‘Stand in Awe of All Mna’ became a touchstone for the Repeal the Eighth movement, and whose film Dublin Oldschool — a moving depiction of family relationships and drug use in Dublin — opened to major acclaim in Ireland earlier this year.

Together, the panel will discuss how their backgrounds have influenced their work and tell the audience about the issues that resonate most with them in the Ireland and Britain of today. This panel discussion will be recorded for the My Roots are Showing podcast with Nadine O’Regan.

For more information on Festival of Politics and to book tickets check out their website here. You can also visit their Facebook page and follow them on Twitter.