Festival thrives in the Gutter and the Alley

So many literary festivals are knocking around these days, especially in Dublin, that you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re a bit samey. Such is not the case, however, with Dublin Book Festival, which this year will be based in and around the hip Gutter Bookshop, on Cow’s Lane, and Smock Alley Theatre, home throughout the 18th century to a plethora of printers and publishers.

“It has actually been quite easy for us to develop our own identity,” says Julianne Mooney, the event’s programme director. “While some festivals focus on household names, our festival tends to concentrate on smaller names and emerging writers. Some 95 per cent of our authors are Irish-published, and while we do have some big names on the programme, our festival aims to give all authors in Ireland, across a wide range of books, a chance to showcase their work.”

Not that the festival will be bereft of big names. Dervla Murphy and Alice Taylor will talk about what has inspired them as writers, and Patricia Scanlan, Sheila O’Flanagan and Sinéad Moriarty will get together for a tribute to Maeve Binchy.

There will also be sessions on cookery books, gardening books and crime fiction; poetry readings and book launches; discussions on current affairs and sport; and readings by some of our best short-story writers, including Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

The best news of all is that, apart from a small number of evening events, most of the festival sessions, including all daytime talks and readings, are free.

Next Saturday and Sunday are two full days of free family events, including an all-day drop-in treasure hunt on a trail around Temple Bar, storytelling with Niall de Burca and workshops on bookbinding and cartoons. The festival runs from November 13th to 18th. Details on dublinbookfestival.com.

Cottrell Boyce’s ‘Coat’ wins ‘Guardian’ gong

Congratulations to Frank Cottrell Boyce, the Liverpool-born author with Irish roots, who has won this year’s Guardian Children’s Fiction prize for his novel The Unforgotten Coat – even though he did, to our chagrin, pip Roddy Doyle’s A Greyhound of a Girl at the post.

The story of two Mongolian refugee brothers in Liverpool, The Unforgotten Coat began life as a free gift to promote a charity, the Reader Organisation, with thousands of copies given away by its publisher, Walker Books, on buses, at ferry terminals and through schools, prisons and hospitals.

Can Random Penguin help fight the giants?

This week’s announcement that Random House and Penguin are to “merge their publishing arms” had a vaguely benign air, as if it were an affectionate industry group hug. But is it, in fact, an embrace more akin to the mother of all rugby scrums?

When the merger finally goes through, towards the end of next year – if it isn’t stopped by the UK competition commission, which apparently is unlikely – the new megacompany will publish a quarter of all books sold in the UK, from Jamie Oliver to John le Carré and from Zadie Smith to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Nobody – least of all the authors involved, many of whom are, of course, Irish – seems to know exactly what the merger will bring. There has been speculation that it will spell the end of the iconic Penguin Classics series, that backlists will be severely cut, that writers will suffer from internal bidding wars.

One thing is certain: the publishing industry will never be the same again.

On the plus side, at least there will still be a publishing industry.

Optimists claim that a handful of big “legacy” publishers will be better able to stand up to the threat posed by the digital giants Apple, Google and Amazon.

For the moment, though, it seems it’s a case of watch this space – and spend as much time and money as you can in your local bookshop.