In The Irish Times this Saturday, there is a marvellous essay by Eimear McBride on the joy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and a Q&A with Michael Harding.
John Self reviews five of the best Irish literary magazines, plus John Banville on The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel; Catherine Taylor on the best new translations; John Burns on An File, Mícheál Ó Gaoithín The Blasket Painter, edited by Maria Simonds; Neil Hegarty on If the River Is Hidden by Cherry Smyth and Craig Jordan-Baker; Kevin Gildea on Hewbris by Ian MacPherson; Brian Hanley on Rotten Prod: The Unlikely Career of Dongaree Baird by Emmet O’Connor; Adam Coleman on Astonish Me! First Nights That Changed the World by Dominic Dromgoole; Deirdre McQuillan on House and Home in Georgian Ireland, edited by Conor Lucey; Rachel Andrews on Well-Kept Ruins by Helene Cixous, tr. Beverley Bie Brahic; Gina Menzies on The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922 by Mary Kenny; Sara Keating on new children’s books; and Sarah Gilmartin on Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Roe is this Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer. You can but it with your newspaper for €4.99, a €6 saving.
Irish playwright Neil Flynn has won first prize in the 27th International Radio Playwriting Competition at a ceremony at BBC Broadcasting House, in London. Flynn’s winning script, The Snowman, was chosen out of 850 submissions from more than 100 countries. It is the first time that the international award has been won by an Irish person. The Snowman is a lyrical monologue about an Antarctic explorer’s desperate attempts to make it back to base camp.
As part of the award, Flynn’s script is being turned into a dramatic recording that will be broadcast to millions of listeners on BBC World Service in February of next year. Flynn was notified that he had won the competition in 2020. However, the award was placed on hold due the outbreak of the global pandemic.
“After a long two-year wait caused by the global pandemic, it has been fantastic to finally be able to welcome our winners to the BBC in London to record their plays and celebrate their achievement”, said Toby Swift Executive Editor, BBC Audio Drama, London. “Neil Flynn’s beautifully lyrical monologue has been a joy for our team to work on and we look forward to sharing it with the world in February.”
The International Radio Playwriting Competition is supported by the British Council and welcomes scripts from anyone outside the UK, whether established or new writers. The dramas need to be 53 minutes long and can be on any subject. Flynn, who has been writing plays for over a decade, said he was honoured to have won.
“I am absolutely thrilled to have won the competition,” he said. “The Snowman is inspired by Irish polar explorer Tom Crean’s efforts to save a sick crew member during his first Antarctic expedition and the desperate attempts to make it back to base camp with two colleagues. I can’t wait for people to hear the piece on the BBC World Service next year.”
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The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the voice for the value of literature in the UK, has announced the winners of the 2022 RSL Literature Matters Awards, including an Irish Creative Writing Summer School in LIverpool.
Now in their fifth year, the awards aim to enable literary excellence and innovation, providing writers with financial support to undertake new literary projects that extend the reach of literature. Seven projects from writers working across multiple disciplines and forms have been chosen by judges Melanie Abrahams, Sophie Collins and Ian Duhig.
Margaret Connell, Michael Dunne and John Maguire will recieve £2,000 towards a creative writing summer school for children aged 9-12 of Irish, Irish Traveller, and Roma ethnicity.
Connell, Dunne and Maguire run ArtsGroupie, a community interest company (CIC), incorporated in 2018, which specialises in the performing arts, community outreach and heritage conservation, and whose mission is to provide access to arts, culture and creativity to all communities.
“We are thrilled and incredibly grateful to RSL for granting us this award,” said Dunne. “This money will help children from high deprivation areas of the Liverpool City Region engage in creative literary activity which is something we believe all children should have the right and opportunity to do. Irish, and Irish Traveller peoples continue to be victims of anti-Irish sentiment, and racial discrimination. We are ecstatic to provide Irish children the chance to get creative with writing in a safe and welcoming environment, all made possible by the RSL.”
Sophie Collins, one of the judges, said: “The Irish Creative Writing Summer School will be an invaluable opportunity for children from low-literacy demographics to explore their creativity and experience the joy of sharing their words.”
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Paul Muldoon: Laoithe ‘s Liricí/A Life in Lyrics will be brodcast on TG4 on December 28th, at 9.20pm. In this feature-length documentary, directed by Alan Gilsenan and produced by Stephen Douds, the poet explores life and language in a series of musical collaborations with artists including Paul Simon, Liam Neeson, PJ Harvey, Bono, Ruth Negga, Paul Brady and Iarla Ó Lionáird.
The poet said “When the idea of a documentary about my life was first raised, I was concerned that it would follow the conventional pattern of a core interview intercut with lots of staring into the distance and sage and seasoned critical comments from the great and the good. Boresville, in other words. So I was thrilled when Alan Gilsenan fell in with my vision of a film that would have a much less predictable aspect. Thrilled, too, that Below the Radar along with BBC and TG4 were so enthusiastic in their support of our determination to do something out of the ordinary.”
Director Alan Gilsenan said: “It was a great delight to go on a strange, musical odyssey with Paul Muldoon through his life and his ceaseless imagination - and to capture his collaborations with so many remarkable artists and friends. I’m left with a host of wonderful memories and encounters which I hope have been documented in this film.”
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Poetry Ireland in association with Trinity College Dublin and Stanford University, USA has announced the second Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award. Submissions are now open. The 2023 judges are Professor of English (Emerita) at Trinity College and Saoi of Aosdána, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Stanford’s Mohr Visiting Poet for spring 2023, Diane Seuss.
The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award is for two emerging poets, one from Ireland and one from the United States, presented with the support of the Boland/Casey family. The award has been made possible with the support of Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of the United States in Ireland and The Arts Council.
Liz Kelly, director of Poetry Ireland said, “It is fantastic to see the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award in its second year. In her editorial for Poetry Ireland Review 125, Eavan memorably wrote,”the margin re-defines the centre, and not the other way around. But that margin has to be visible, has to be vocal, has to be sustained by new critiques as well as new poems.”
This award testifies to Eavan Boland’s advocacy of emerging poets, bringing new voices to the fore at every opportunity. Poetry Ireland are proud to offer this award again, in an enhanced form, offering residencies on campus in both the US and Ireland supported by Stanford and TCD respectively. Its announcement coincides with the release of the special Eavan Boland Issue of Poetry Ireland Review, edited by Nessa O Mahony, a fitting tribute to one of the most significant poets of our time.”
The inaugural offering of the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award received over 300 applications. This year’s Award is, once again, open to emerging poets in Ireland and the US who have not yet published a first full collection but are working towards that or similar. Two poets will be chosen for a residency to the value of €3,000 at Trinity College Dublin and Stanford University in California, as well as a bursary of €2.000 each to support their work over the course of the year. Three mentoring sessions from leading poets are offered over the course of four months.
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The judges for the Booker Prize 2023 have been announced. Novelist Esi Edugyan, twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, will chair the panel and will be joined by Adjoa Andoh, actor, writer and director; Mary Jean Chan, poet, lecturer and critic; James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an author specialising in Shakespeare; and Robert Webb, actor and writer.
Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “I am hugely looking forward to working with this lively and lovely panel of readers. They bring to the task of discovering next year’s best fiction a strikingly wide range of knowledge and a shared enthusiasm for storytelling in all its forms. “Esi Edugyan described herself, in her latest book of essays, as a storyteller with an interest in overlooked narratives. That’s clear from her two Booker-shortlisted novels, Washington Black and Half Blood Blues, which, though very different from each other, are both magnificent entertainments and subtle acts of reimagining. I have no doubt that her astuteness and calm will bring out the very best in this glorious group.”
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The three recipients of the 2022 Giles St Aubyn Awards, which support writers on their first commissioned works of non-fiction, are Nuzha Nuseibeh (£10,000) for Namesake (Canongate, 2023), Ellen Atlanta (£5,000) for Pixel Flesh: Modern Beauty Culture and The Women It Harms (Headline, Hachette, 2023) and Malachi McIntosh (£2,500) for A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement (Faber, 2025). This year’s awards were judged by Homi K Bhahba, Fiona St Aubyn and Violet Moller.
