Ian Hyland buys Quartet Books; World Library Congress comes to Dublin

In The Irish Times this Saturday, in an extract from her memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, data scientist Suad Aldarra recalls her early days in Galway, where she and her husband settled after fleeing the war in Syria. Anna Carey offers an eclectic selection of holiday reading to suit every taste. Irish academic Ronan Lee, whose book, Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech, has been banned by the ruling junta, gives a personal account of what is happening there. Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka talks to Ronan McGreevy about the political crisis in his country.

Reviews are Peter Berresford Ellis on The Celts: A Sceptical History by Simon Jenkins; Patrick Gale on All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Kathleen Lynch on Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State by Tom O’Donoghue and Judith Harford; Rita Sakr on I Don’t Want to Talk About Home: A migrant’s search for belonging by Suad Aldarra; Andrew Gallix on James Greer’s Bad Eminence; Tony Clayton-Lea on the best new music books; Paul Clements on local history books; and Sarah Gilmartin on Things to Come and Go by Bette Howard.

This Saturday’s Irish Times Eason reader offer is April in Spain by John Banville, only €4.99 when you buy a newspaper in any store, a saving of €6.

Irish businessman Ian Hyland has bought independent publisher Quartet Books, whose future had been uncertain following the death of its chairman Naim Attallah last year.

Quartet Books was established in 1972 and bought by Attallah in 1976. Renowned as a home for radical authors, it published Helmut Newton, Brian Sewell, Sally Emerson, Michael Darlow, Barbara Bray, John Swannell, Desmond Cecil, Rupert Darwell, Amanda Prantera and Jonnah Yacoub.

Hyland, the owner of Catalyst Media Group and publisher of Business & Finance, plans to relaunch titles from Quartet’s existing catalogue while signing new books. Under the newly incorporated Quartet Publishing in London and Dublin, he also hopes to expand the publisher for an international audience in the US and Ireland.

“I am honoured to be the custodian of Quartet Books which has an incredibly rich legacy as a champion of independent book publishing,” Hyland said. “I believe while respecting Quartet’s heritage we will now begin to build an exciting international independent publishing business working with new authors.

“Quartet Publishing will creatively embrace modern publishing practices in print and digital to maximise the potential for our authors, titles and reader experience. This is a very exciting time for book publishing and I look forward to working closely with our community of authors and partners to commence a new exciting chapter in Quartet’s journey.”

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The world’s most important international library conference will be held at the Convention Centre Dublin from July 26th to 29th.

The World Library and Information Congress is organised by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the largest global library organisation representing tens of thousands of libraries and librarians worldwide.

The Library Association of Ireland is the local host organisation and has been working closely with IFLA for more than two years to bring it to Ireland for the first time. This will be the first in-person IFLA Congress since 2019. It will attract nearly 2,000 delegates from more than 100 countries, making it the largest global library conference in 2022.

As a curtain raiser to the main event, a ‘flash mob’ will be held in central Dublin on July 25th, featuring public readings of Ulysses to mark its 100th anniversary. On July 26th, former president Mary Robinson will give a keynote address at the opening ceremony.

This will be followed by three days of talks, workshops and exhibitions on topics ranging from Library History to Artificial Intelligence and including a speaker from Ukraine discussing the current state of libraries in that country.

Our own libraries will be on international display, with a full day of visits to libraries throughout Ireland included in the programme.

Full information on the event including the programme is available at 2022.ifla.org

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The Goethe-Institut Irland is to host a travelling virtual reality exhibition at its premises on Merrion Square, Dublin, which invites visitors to reimagine the future of libraries as interactive spaces that offer multisensory forms of storytelling.

Entitled The Infinite Library, the multimedia installation’s central piece is a vast VR library, set in a cave, in which visitors can explore a series of smaller sub-libraries, dedicated to topics as diverse as Polynesian navigation, South-Indian puppetry and European alchemy.

Creative director of the exhibition Mika Johnson said: “The Infinite Library seeks to embed human stories within a much grander narrative, one which includes the birth of our planet and the evolution of all life forms.

“It reimagines what we generally understand a library to be and offers a glimpse of what a library might look like in the future. The virtual library space at the heart of the installation is conceived as a living organism, a kind of embodiment of knowledge that introduces itself to visitors personally before inviting them to explore its house.”

The Infinite Library will open on Saturday, July 23rd and run until July 29th. The exhibition is free to visit and all are welcome.

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White Rabbit Books has announced a new podcast, Songbook, presented and written by the award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author Jude Rogers. Each episode will feature Jude in conversation with a special guest dissecting one exciting music book in detail.

The first season will feature guests ranging from authors to musicians, broadcasters and journalists, including Brett Anderson, Shirley Collins, Vashti Bunyan, Stephanie Phillips (Big Joanie), Ian Rankin, Adelle Stripe, Zakia Sewell and more. The episodes will be published weekly, starting from July 21st. The music for the show has been written by the electronic musician and composer David Holmes - the man behind the musical world of Killing Eve, Ocean’s Trilogy and more.

The series will kick off with an episode dedicated to Fred Vermorel’s wickedly sharp, multifaceted - and often filthy - oral history of pop fandom, Starlust, chosen by Jude to discuss with one of her favourite musicians from her teenage years, Brett Anderson.

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Echoes, Ireland’s only literary festival with Maeve Binchy at its heart, has announced its line-up for the end of September.  Running from September 30th to October 2nd at Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre, it will feature sessions that brings together some of Ireland’s finest contemporary creative voices to celebrate unique stories and explore how they tell their tales across fiction, nonfiction, stage and screen. Some of the participants include Sarah Binchy, Christine Green, Séamas O’Reilly, Sinead Crowley, Lenny Abrahamson and Paul Howard to name but a few.  Tickets available on echoes.ie.

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The second #Merky Books New Writers Prize Winner, The Things That We Lost by Jyoti Patel will be published next January. The inaugural winner, Hafsa Zayyan’s We Are All Birds of Uganda which was one of the bestselling debuts of 2021. Jyoti’s debut novel explores what it means to be a young person of colour in Britain today, discussing themes of identity and coming of age. Jyoti is British Asian and lives in London.