San Patrizio (Everywhere!) Festival: Episode #1, Islamabad

Some stories begin with a plan. This one began with a saint who, according to legend, landed at the port of Livorno: enough of an excuse, years ago, for a few of us to found a literary festival there and name it after him. The San Patrizio Livorno Festival was about Irish culture in Italy, cultural mediation, cultura viva: literature and music and theatre not locked behind glass, but lived, spoken, and felt.

Jump to What comes next

I never imagined it would one day travel to Islamabad.

But here we are, and this is the first episode of a story I want to keep, and tell, on this page.

From San Patrizio Livorno Festival to San Patrizio Islamabad Festival: The Story so Far

What #SPLF, SP*F, and SPIF Are?

San Patrizio Livorno Festival (SPLF): how, and where, everything started. San Patrizio Islamabad Festival (SPIF): this initiative. San Patrizio Festival (SP*F): the umbrella and brand for everything else, everywhere, about Irish culture in a cultural-mediation context.

Just Human: Beckett (Watch it here)

It started with Beckett. On 13 April 2026, Beckett’s birthday, we held an online roundtable called Just Human: Beckett, connecting Ireland, Italy, and Pakistan. The premise was simple and, I think, important: that Beckett’s work speaks to us regardless of where we come from, because it speaks to the human condition itself, which has no nationality.

The heart of it was Ahmad Umar Ayaz, a playwright and scholar who has devoted his creative and academic life to Beckett, and who translated, and directed, Waiting for Godot into Urdu. When he describes that translation, he says something that has stayed with me: that the play “translated itself, because it doesn’t depend on language, the humanity of Beckett.”

The evening brought together H.E. Mary O’Neill, Ambassador of Ireland to Pakistan; Elizabeth Barry, President of the Samuel Beckett Society; the poet and cultural mediator Ola Majekodunmi; the poet and playwright Daniel Flynn; Marta Righetti of (Italian Friends of) The Citizens Foundation; and Federico Platania, brain and soul of samuelbeckett.it, my long-standing partner in all-that-Beckett.

John Banville (novelist, Booker laureate, and Lifetime Patron of our festival) sent his blessing:

“That Godot should find new life in Urdu, and that this conversation should support education for young people in Pakistan, honours both Beckett’s work and our shared humanity.”

The event supported The Citizens Foundation and its work for girls’ education in Pakistan. It still does.

Bloomsday Islamabad (Watch it here)

Then came June.

On 18 June 2026, we made the first-ever Bloomsday (the worldwide celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses) in Islamabad happen with the Embassy of Ireland, San Patrizio Festival, and Ahmad’s Qissa Khwani Theatrics.

Bloomsday, elsewhere, tends to be a celebration in costume. We wanted something with more weight, because Islamabad offered something no other city could: a mirror. Not a copy of Dublin, but a fragment of the same glass. Rawalpindi, the great British garrison town, sits beside the planned post-colonial capital: an occupied geography beside an assertion of independence. This is Joyce’s Dublin seen from the other side of empire.

And then there was Molly.

Molly Bloom was born in Gibraltar (a British rock…) and speaks, at the close of Ulysses, from a bed in occupied Dublin, in a monologue that has no full stops and asks no one’s permission. Researching the landay, the two-line oral poetic form that Pashtun women have kept alive for centuries to say what they were not permitted to say, I found something I had not expected. Buried inside Molly’s monologue, extracted exactly as they stand, are landays. Joyce wrote them without knowing it. Molly spoke them without a name for what they were.

An example?

The sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire
and the glorious sunsets

Colonized countries and silenced women speak the same language. On that evening, in Islamabad, Molly spoke it in Pashto, performed for the first time anywhere by Nihal Farid and Uzma I. Kunwar, moderated by Ahmad. It is the thing I am proudest of.

• Bloomsday Islamabad 2026 on Ireland.ie, official website of the Government of Ireland:
  • Embassy Islamabad celebrates Bloomsday in Pakistan

What comes next

This is Episode #1, which means there will be more.

The Irish Embassy in Pakistan has confirmed its support for a new Urdu production of Waiting for Godot, and I will be in Islamabad for it. Alongside it, conversations are underway that I could not have imagined a year ago: a proposed Beckett Centre at Air University; a workshop on Beckett, AI, and creativity; and the possibility of bringing Waiting for Godot in Urdu to Ireland itself. All of it unfolds alongside an ongoing collaboration with the Samuel Beckett Society.

The San Patrizio Festival was always about building bridges. This one is longer and more ambitious than any we have built before. But we will go on trying and, as an old friend of ours would put it: fail again, fail better.

Are You in Pakistan?

Reading this from Pakistan? This is the door. Follow the story here, and write to me: collaborators, performers, translators, and, well: the dreamers are all welcome.

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Last But Definitely Not Least: Supporting The Citizens Foundation

The Initiative continues to support The Citizens Foundation and girls’ education in Pakistan.