Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes: Elmwood Hall, November 17th, 6 p.m. Winner of this year's Booker Prize for Amsterdam, the English novelist Ian McEwan teams up with Booker runner up Julian Barnes for a joint reading and discussion of their work. Donald Hall and Tim Robinson: Elmwood Hall, November 19th, 8 p.m. American poet and critic Donald Hall, whose work owes its sense of place to New Hampshire will be joined by writer Tim Robinson. Through books such as Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1985) and his meticulous study of place names, Robinson has created a unique literature of landscape as well as contributing to a long overdue culturally-based understanding not only of the Irish landscape but of the unique language and culture of the West of Ireland.
Owen O'Neill: Crescent Arts Centre, November 21st to 23rd, 7.30 p.m.
Owen O'Neill will give three performances of David Johnson's New York in a Poet a Festival-commissioned one man show based on the lecture Federico Garcia Lorca delivered in Madrid in 1932. Marking the centenary earlier this year of the birth of the Spanish writer, the show promises to evoke the atmosphere of the New York Lorca discovered in 1929 as well as the Cuba he loved and of course his native Andalucia.
Ronan Bennett and Gillian Slovo: Harty Room, November 23rd, 6 p.m. Author of The Catastrophist Belfast-born novelist Ronan Bennett and South African Gillian Slovo should prove an interesting pairing on November 23rd as they explore the personal and political in their writings.
Celebrating Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal 1938-1998: G9 Lanyon Building QUB, November 26th, 5 p.m.; Autumn Journal Means to Me . . . Harty Room, November 29th, 2 p.m.-6 p.m. Sixty years after its publication Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal will be celebrated by two events; Paul Foot, poet Carol Rumens and Samuel Hynes, Emeritus Professor at Princeton University participate in a discussion on November 26th while on November 29th poets and writers including Michael Longley and Jennifer Johnston will explain what the work means to them. Brendan Kennelly: Ulster Museum, November 20th, 7.30 p.m. Brendan Kennelly reads from his own work. John Montague: Ulster Museum, November 29th, 3 p.m. Newly elected to the Ireland Chair of Poetry in Queen's University, John Montague gives a reading. Thomas Lynch and Blake Morrison: Harty Room, November 24th, 6 p.m.
Another strong poetry event is guaranteed when the American poet Thomas Lynch, whose highly original prose work The Undertaking: Life Studies in the Dismal Trade emerged as one of the best books of 1997, teams up with fellow poet Blake Morrison. Both men have written extremely perceptively about death; Lynch experiences it daily through his work as an undertaker back home in Michigan, while Morrison's When Did You Last See Your Father?, his account of his father's death is an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning memoir genre.
