The annual Aspects literary festival in Bangor, Co Down, will run from Wednesday, September 23rd until Sunday, September 27th. Headlining this year's programme are the novelists Bernard MacLaverty and Maurice Leitch.
MacLaverty's latest novel, Grace Notes, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year while Leitch's The Smoke King, has already won much critical praise. Both are from the North but have developed very distinctive voices and should offer a good opportunity to compare and contrast developing aesthetics.
The young things in the programme will be represented by Kate O'Riordan whose first novel Involved was short-listed for the Dillon's First Fiction Prize and David Park, whose latest work is Stone Kingdoms.
Journalist and author Fergal Keane will talk on Despatches From The Heart while Prof Anthony Clare will offer a view from the psychiatrist's chair. Also in attendance will be the author of To School Through The Fields, Alice Taylor.
Kerry Hardie, Moyra Donaldson, Chris Agee and Richard Murphy will be among the poets reading. The poet Carol Rumens, former writer-in-residence at the Queen's University, Belfast, will be giving a masterclass and places are strictly limited.
Also under discussion will be the works of C.S. Lewis, in A Celebration of C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis - Ulsterman? and C.S. Lewis - As We Knew Him. Very exhaustive but, hopefully, not exhausting. Information: (08)(01247) 271200
