In The Irish Times tomorrow. Derek Scally reports from Berlin on the premiere of the adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh. Anna Carey writes about how she turned her book The Making of Mollie into a play, which opens at Dublin’s The Ark next week. There is also a Q&A with Chris Agee, poet and founder of the Irish Pages literary journal.
Reviews are Chris Kissane on They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence by Lauren Benton; Sinéad Gleeson on After a Dance by Bridget O’Connor; Lucy Sweeney-Byrne on The Real Thing by Terry Eagleton; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Stephen Walker on Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera; Ray Burke on Infectious Generosity by Chris Anderson; Pat Carty on A Hundred to One by Pat Sheedy; Neil Hegarty on James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder by Chris Bryant; Eamon Maher on John McGahern: Ways of Looking by John Singleton; Brian Maye on Every Branch of the Healing Art: A History of the RCSI by Ronan Kelly; Paul Clements on local history books; and Sarah Gilmartin on The Lodgers by Holly Pester.
This week’s Irish Times Eason book offer is Old God’s Time, the Booker Prize longlisted novel by Sebastian Barry. You can buy it in any store with your paper for €5.99, a €5 saving.
The Ambassadors of the Francophonie in Ireland, working in partnership with Literature Ireland, have announced their 2024 shortlist for their annual literature prize, the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie en Irlande.
A prize of €1,500 is awarded by the ambassadors to the winning Irish author, and a visit to Ireland is arranged by Literature Ireland for the translator. The aim of the prize is to promote French language and culture, and to celebrate literary translation into French.
The shortlisted works this year are: Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places / En ces lieux bienfaisants, translated by Karine Lalechère (Phébus, 2023); Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses / Troubles, translated by Cécile Leclère (Éditions Denoël, 2023); Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking / Ligne de fuite, translated by France Camus-Pichon, (Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2023); and Donal Ryan’s A Slanting of the Sun / Soleil oblique et autres histoires irlandaises, translated by Marie Hermet (Albin Michel, 2023)
The winning author and translator pair will be announced on March 5th by Minister Peter Burke at an event to mark the start of Francophonie month, a month dedicated to the celebration of French language and culture.
The 16-strong longlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been announced, with authors from America, Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, the Philippines and the UK. The books vary in style and genre, from gripping memoirs to innovative new histories, ground-breaking journalism and books that challenge the status quo.
The longlisted titles are: The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia; Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakeley; Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon; Intervals by Marianne Brooker; Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji; Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming; Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista; Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones; Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein; A Flat Place by Noreen Masud; All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles; Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia; The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie; Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots by Leah Redmond Chang; and How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair.
Prof Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of judges for this year’s awards, said: “Reading for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been a revelation and a joy. I am very proud to introduce the sensational books that make up the inaugural Longlist. Our selection represents the breadth of women’s non-fiction writing: science, history, memoir, technology, literary biography, health, linguistics, investigative journalism, art history, activism, travel-writing and economics. And each author has created a masterpiece that is worthy of your attention. Buy them, borrow them – above all read them – and in so doing you’ll be elevating women’s voices and female perspectives in a whole range of disciplines and on a whole host of topics.”
The shortlist will be announced on March 27th and the winner of the £30,000 prize on June 13th.
Celebrating 40 years in 2024, the Limerick Literary Festival will run from February 23rd to 25th at the Dooradoyle Library and the Belltable. The event honours the life and works of Limerick author Kate O’Brien while attracting prominent participants from all over the world. The festival is also marking the 50th anniversary of the death of O’Brien, having started as The Kate O’Brien Weekend in 1984 to mark the tenth anniversary of her death.
Building on this significant history, the Limerick Literary Festival seeks to promote Limerick nationally as a place of literary excellence and to provide a platform where readers can meet their favourite authors and other readers.
The festival will be opened with an intimate evening of words and music by spoken-word artist and musician Denise Chaila and the full weekend programme feature authors Vona Groarke, Mary Morrissy, Antoine Laurain, Francis Spufford, Dorothy Cross, Dr Jana Fischerova, Elaine Feeney, Jane Clarke and Claire Keegan. It will also feature perennial favourite Desert Island Books, a session with Poetry Pharmacist William Sieghart and the presentation of the 2024 Kate O’Brien Award for a debut novel or short story collection from a female Irish author.
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From 1-4pm on Wednesday, February 21st, Prof Maebh Harding and Julie Morrissy, 2024 Law & Poetry Fellow, University College Dublin Sutherland School of Law, will be hosting a durational reading of the Bunreacht/Irish Constitution in the Gardiner Atrium at the UCD School of Law. The event is free and open to the public. You can drop in at any time and stay for however long you like.
By reading the Bunreacht aloud from start to finish, the aim is to emphasise the importance of collective and collaborative reading practices as a means to bolster community and spark conversations about potential changes to our society.
Maynooth University has announced that 2023 Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch has been appointed Maynooth University Distinguished Writing Fellow.
Lynch is a multi-award-winning author of five novels – his Booker winner Prophet Song (2023), Red Sky in the Morning (2013), The Black Snow (2014), Grace (2017), Beyond the Sea (2019) -- making him one of Ireland’s most prolific and critically-acclaimed contemporary authors.
Prior to winning the Booker Prize in November, his novels were nominated for or have won the Prix du Premier Roman, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Prix Gens de Mer and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.
Prof Alison Hood, Dean of Arts, Celtic Studies & Philosophy, said that Maynooth University was delighted with the appointment.
“Paul’s novels are testament to an extraordinary and visionary talent. Paul was Maynooth University’s Arts Council Writer-in-Residence in 2023. This appointment means that Maynooth University welcomes Paul back as a colleague in the Department of English, where he will teach on the MA in Creative Writing.”
After a successful Irish tour in 2017, 2019, and again in 2022, as well as ten sold out seasons at the Irish Arts Center in New York, Muldoon’s Picnic returns for four dates nationwide from May 13th-17th.
An omnium-gatherum of poetry, prose and music, Muldoon’s Picnic is a cabaret-style evening, hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.
Devised and developed by the acclaimed Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the show is hosted by Muldoon and house band Rogue Oliphant - a collective of musicians and composers including Chris Harford (Three Colors, Band of Changes), Cáit O’Riordan (The Pogues), David Mansfield (Bob Dylan, The Alpha Band), Ray Kubian (Electric Six, Chris Forsyth) and Warren Zanes (Del Fuegos).
On May 13th, in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, Muldoon and house band Rogue Oliphant will be joined by Booker Prize winning novelist Anna Burns, poet Padraig Regan, and Oscar-winning musician Glen Hansard.
The Market Place Theatre in Armagh on May 15th event features TS Eliot Prize nominee Jane Clarke, composer and musician Colm Mac Con Iomaire and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright.
On May 16th at Wexford Arts Centre, author Donal Ryan, singer and harpist Síle Denvir and poet Nithy Kasa will be the guests. The final night of the tour, May 17th, in the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire, features Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, guitarist, composer and author Hugh Buckley, poet Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and author Liz Nugent.
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Two Irish illustrators have been longlisted for the 2024 Yoto Carnegies, the UK’s longest-running book awards for children and young people – Steve McCarthy for The Wilderness, an adventure book celebrating learning opportunities in the great outdoors, and Paddy Donnelly for Sarah Tagholm’s Wolves in Helicopters, a dark and atmospheric tale offering practical advice to overcome nightmares and disturbed sleep.
A total of 36 books have been selected from 20 different publishers; 19 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing, and 18 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration.
One title has been longlisted in both Medal categories – Tyger by SF Said, illustrated by Dave McKean. Four previous winners are again longlisted for the Medal for Illustration; two-time winner Sydney Smith for My Baba’s Garden, Bob Graham for The Concrete Garden, Jon Klassen for The Skull and Catherine Rayner for The Bowerbird.
Former Carnegie Medal for Writing winner Anthony McGowen is longlisted for Dogs of the Deadland, a tale of survival inspired by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Waterstones Children’s Laureate and previous shortlistee Joseph Coelho is longlisted for The Boy Lost in the Maze, one of four verse novels recognised for the Medal for Writing. The other three are by New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander and debut authors Cathy Faulkner and Tia Fisher.
Eight-time shortlisted author Marcus Sedgwick has been longlisted posthumously for Ravencave, the follow-up to Wrath, longlisted in 2023. A further four previous shortlistees are longlisted: Kwame Alexander (2019), Phil Earle (2022) and Candy Gourlay (2019) for writing and Poonam Mistry, who has been shortlisted three times (2019, 2020 and 2021) for illustration.
The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding reading experiences in books for children and young people. They are unique in being judged by librarians, with the Shadowers’ Choice Medal voted for by children and young people. The longlists were chosen from 129 nominations by the judging panel which includes 12 children’s and youth librarians from CILIP’s Youth Libraries Group.
The shortlists will be announced on March 13th at London Book Fair. The winners will be announced and celebrated on June 20th at a livestreamed ceremony.
