The story
Kilkenny Arts Festival in Kilkenny
A roughly ten-day early-August multidisciplinary arts festival in Kilkenny, founded in 1974 as Kilkenny Arts Week, staging classical music, theatre, dance, and literature across the city's medieval venues including the working thirteenth-century St Canice's Cathedral, with St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny Castle, and the Watergate Theatre among its recurring principal performance venues each August.
Poet Seamus Heaney read at the inaugural edition of this festival in 1974, when it launched under the name Kilkenny Arts Week, and it has since grown into a roughly ten-day early-August programme spanning classical music, theatre, dance, visual arts, and literature across the medieval city.