The final chapter of our Feed Your Mind Body & Soul social media campign went live this week. Throughout this campaign we have been exploring the importance of developing empathy. Empathy gives us insight into the lives of others and into humanity. We are all exercising empathy through our actions during the Covid-19 restrictions. We are taking action for the benefit of ourselves, we are learning how a daily act of solidarity and consideration for others can directly affect our national and global community.
We can develop and express our empathy through many different ways and, through this campaign we have been asking young people to consider that you can show empathy through music, art, health and wellbeing, food and literature. We can spend some time each day writing in a diary or journal to record our thoughts or maybe even try some creative writing, create a blog or write a netflix movie review for your friends.
We asked some Irish authors to talk to the young people of Foróige about how important empathy is as a tool for writing.
With the constrains of social distancing we were able to gather video interviews from Authors Shane Hegarty, Frances Macken and Eoin Colfer. You can watch these videos below.
Foróige Friends Recommended Books
Through instagram stories we reached out to young people to recommend a book for their Foróige friends, this compiled recommended reading list is available here as a download.
Frances Macken is an Irish author, her book 'You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here' is available now from all good book retailers
Dublin based Shane Hegarty was once the Arts Editor of the Irish Times, now though he writes children's books and has written the acclaimed Darkmouth series.
Eoin Colfer is a children's fiction writer from Wexford in Ireland. He wrote the Artemis Fowl series of eight fantasy books. He has also written Benny and Omar, Spud Murphy, Airman and many more. Artemis Fowl the movie will be released in June 2020 by Disney.
