IGNESNPEIRRAINTGIONS SHOAINLMAIRUREEYLLHABENERDCO’KSNEMTOTDAENRDNHISITSSINCFULLUPETNOCRE, Billy Shortall graduated from Trinity with a BSc in Computer Science in 1984, and MPhil in History of Art in 2015 and has recently completed his PhD with the Department of History of Art and Architecture in 2020. Sometimes referred to as ‘the last modernist’, Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) pushed the boundaries of storytelling to their limits. He studied Modern Languages at Trinity from 1923 to 1927 which he said provided him ‘with much needed light’ in his well-documented literary career. In April 1948, the year he started writing the seminal Waiting for Godot, he had a visit to his Paris home from his cousin by marriage, the young Irish sculptor Hilary Heron (1923-77). Heron was a talented Irish artist who won numerous prizes for her work throughout her career. One such prize, the Mainie Jellett Travel Scholarship, enabled her to travel to spend a year in Paris and visit other locations in Europe in 1948. With her prize Heron, unconventionally, bought a motorbike and drove through England to Paris. The destruction of the Second World War was still everywhere to be seen. In Paris, she briefly stayed with Beckett and his partner Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil before settling in a more permanent base in the city. Heron socialised with Beckett and Déchevaux-Dumesnil and the writer, in particular, was her ticket to the Paris art world and regularly introduced her to artists, critics, galleries and exhibitions.