Manchester announces Prof Tóibín appointment:Colm Tóibín is to become professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. After a four-year stint the novelist Martin Amis will end his teaching tenure at the university's Centre for New Writing in July, to move to New York, home city of his wife, Isabel Fonseca. Tóibín, who currently teaches at Princeton, starts in Manchester in September.
“I visited the centre for a reading two years ago,” he says, “and I saw and liked how the students combined writing new work with reading and talking about literature, in seminars and workshops and in the public events which bring the work out of the university and into contact with the wider world.”
Tóibín will teach postgraduate students two days a week for one term a year and participate in four public events. He’ll also hold a fiction class for master’s students and a new course, Arts for Writers, in which composers, artists and other arts practitioners will explore how music, art and theatre influence writing.
The Irish poet John McAuliffe, co-director of the Centre for New Writing, says that, as well as inspiring students, Tóibín will contribute to cultural debates inside and outside the university.
A week of prizes for the poetry of mortality
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott's elegiac collection White Egretsthis week won the £15,000 (€17,500) TS Eliot Prize from a 10-book shortlist because, say the judges, it is a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet.
Walcott was born in St Lucia in 1930; his many books include Omeros (1990), in which he invokes the lives and voices of the people of the Caribbean through Greek myth, drawing on Homer's Iliadand Odyssey. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.
Reviewing White Egretson these pages last March, the Irish poet Theo Dorgan found it the best work Walcott had done. "The man who speaks thoughtfully here stands face to face with his own imminent death – and is moved to pity, forgiveness, regret and, almost shockingly, pure adult gratitude for his life," he wrote. "Death is never far away in these poems, the death of a hopeless love in Siracusa, the death of a marriage, marriages, the deaths of friends, loved ones, neighbours, the death of a way of life – all these have their acknowledgment here, but the most numinous death of all, calmly regarded, neither spurned nor invited, is the author's own oncoming death . . . Read this, and be astonished."
Between the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Book of the Year Award, it was a week when the power of poetry to deal with the big issue of mortality was in the ascendant. Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability, inspired by the poet's battle with breast cancer, won the £30,000 (€35,000) Costa.
Inspiration for struggling literary dreamers
Two new authors, Deirdre O'Brien and John Cooney, have been saluted by the novelist Sarah Webb as an inspiration to anyone who has to overcome adversity. Both, she says, are "a testament to the fact that we can often achieve our dreams, once we have belief in ourselves and in our abilities". Both authors attend Dún Laoghaire's RehabCare centre. O'Brien's fantasy fiction, The Adventures of Monkey and Me, and Cooney's poetry collection, A Seat at the Winter Flamenco, are available at €14.99 each.
Top American award for Dalkey Archive Press
Publishing house Dalkey Archive Press, which last week opened offices in Dublin, has been awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle. “It’s lovely to be able to provide a small piece of good news for Ireland,” says Sarah Davis-Goff of the press, whose publisher and founder is John O’Brien.
At the same New York event, the finalists for the circle's 2010 awards were announced, with Paul Murray on the fiction list for Skippy Dies. Winners will be announced in March.
