Liam Browne

In 1995, we joined the UK Year of Literature team in Swansea to co-curate a year-long celebration that we bite-sized into 30 mini-festivals across genres and geography. Browne followed this by creating a new – and stupendously starry – programme for the 1997 and 1998 Belfast Festivals, bringing to the city premier talents Gore Vidal, E Annie Proulx, Brian Eno, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Tracey Emin and Nick Cave (accompanied by Kylie Minogue, no less).

Just as vital was his wider programme embracing theatre and dance that saw the first visits to Northern Ireland of choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, the Wooster Group, and directors Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci.

Browne then worked as literature officer at London’s Southbank Centre and subsequently as literature programmer at the Brighton Festival (2003-09), where he was considered a perceptive and innovative programmer who transformed its offering. He had a great talent for getting people to talk to each other. Some of his inspired pairings in Brighton included Simon Armitage with Robert Macfarlane, Sarah Hall with Hilary Mantel, and Anish Kapoor with Marcus du Sautoy. In 2006, he published his first novel, The Emigrant’s Farewell.

From 2007-14, Browne was programme director of the Dublin Writers’ Festival where, again, he was praised for his transforming contribution. However, Browne found that book festivals’ focus on new publications and their lack of engagement with other art forms narrowed his programming possibilities. As a result, he became involved in co-curating multi-arts festivals that concentrated on a particular playwright, writer, or an individual work of art. 

This approach became the house style of our events, from Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival (2012-22), which brought the Berliner Ensemble to Northern Ireland for the first time, along with Harriet Walter, Miranda Richardson and Toby Jones reading Beckett’s prose; to Commencez! Paris Beckett (2016) and Lughnasa FrielFest in Derry and Donegal (2015-19), involving Maxine Peake, Rory Kinnear and Alex Jennings.

With the company we co-founded, DoranBrowne, Browne co-curated the Sgt Pepper at 50 festival in Liverpool, commissioning choreographer Mark Morris’s Pepperland, among 13 new works; the first-year events of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace with its 190-seat theatre (2016-17); the Creative Folkestone Book Festival (2019-22); and the centenary of The Waste Land, a weekend of performances commissioned by the TS Eliot Foundation across 22 medieval churches in the City of London in 2022.

From 2022-24, as co-directors of Arts Over Borders, Browne and I artistically led the three-year ULYSSES European Odyssey project through 18 European cities, with a different creative partner in each city responding to one of the 18 episodes in James Joyce’s epic novel. The final episode in June 2024, the YES Festival, was co-created by Browne for his home city, Derry.

Liam Browne was born on 9th March, 1960, and died on 21st February. He is survived by his two teenage sons, Tomás and Gabriel, their mother Rachael Duke and his sisters Catherine, Mairead and Claire.