November–December. Irish essayist and poet O’Dwyer is working in residence on Fisl, a book about the remarkable life of atomic and nuclear physicist Fritz Houtermans. Writers’ evening on Monday, December 8 at 6:00 p.m. “The Man Who Discovered How Stars Shine”. During the evening, O’Dwyer will also talk about other works in progress.
Fritz Houtermans (1903–1966) was the first person to propose how stars shine in terms of quantum physics. Fisl looks at the birth of nuclear physics as well as Houtermans’ entanglements with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. After fleeing Berlin, he worked for a time in a legendary physics laboratory in Kharkiv (Ukraine) where he was later arrested during the Stalinist purges. Handed over to the Gestapo, he was put to work on the Nazi nuclear programme, although he maintained contact with his old colleagues who were now working on the Los Alamos project in America. Fisl is about the child-like curiosity that led Houtermans to propose a theoretical understanding of why stars shine. It is also about the abandonment of pure science for the making of nuclear weapons.
Laurence O’Dwyer is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a Ph.D. in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. His first collection of poetry, Tractography (Templar, 2018) received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. In 2019, he was awarded a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation (USA) and completed in his residency at RaumArs, The Lighthouse Journal, which explores the Arctic environment through poetry and prose. The book was based on his time spent at a lighthouse in northern Norway.
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