Along with the launch of his latest book, his first collection of plays, entitled Plays 2012 – 2024’, Jp has been announced as a winner of the 2024 PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Awards with his play ‘The Last Room’.
Dr. Charlotte McIvor, along with Galway-based playwright Christian O’Reilly, will join the chef, restaurateur, and author to launch his first collection of plays in the O’Donoughe Centre at the University of Galway on Thursday, the 12th of December at 5.30 pm.
Jp McMahon has produced a wide selection of cookbooks over the years, including his most recent publication, An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us. Meanwhile, the chef and food educator has also been honing his craft as a playwright. Between 2017 and 2021, Jp completed a PhD in Drama at University of Galway. His PhD focused on playwrighting and how food makes meaning in the theatre, restaurant and the gallery.
Jp’s first collection of work will be published this December. Titled PLAYS, 2012-2024, the collection will be published by Godot Press and includes an introduction by Galway-based playwright Christian O’Reilly.
Three plays in the collection (‘Irish Food. A Play’, ‘Dante.Beckett.Lobster’. and ‘Killing Lobsters’) were all written as part of his PhD. The others were written over a lengthy period of time from 2012-2024, including ‘The Last Room’, which was recently announced as one of the winners in the 2024 PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Awards. The play focuses on two men who meet after travelling through a series of interconnecting rooms, unsure of where they are and what they are supposed to do next. In a dynamic back and forth, new pieces of information are gradually revealed as the tension between them increases.
Speaking about the upcoming publication of his collection of plays and his recent win, Jp McMahon says, “I’m delighted to come third place in the PJ O’Connor Radio Awards. Radio has always appealed to me as a medium, even as a chef, to communicate, and it has been a significant boost as I launch my first collection of plays. The plays in this collection highlight another side of me. For a long time, I have lived a parallel life as a playwright. While working as a chef from my late teenage years, I started to write plays in 1998 after reading Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It is a wonderful realisation to finally see them in print. If I hadn’t joined Christian O’Reilly’s playwrighting group during Covid I may never have tried to assemble a collection. The group gave me the confidence to put my plays into the public realm. As much as I enjoy being a chef, I have always wanted to be a playwright, and I hope that in the future, I can pursue the latter as much as the former.”
PLAYS, 2012-2024 will be launched on December 12th and available to buy from www.aniarrestaurant.ie/Books for €25 plus postage and packaging.
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