A literary round-up
Trinity and the Abbey celebrate Tom Kilroy
A celebration of the work of the playwright Tom Kilroy takes place in Dublin next month. Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy opens on Friday, April 29th at Trinity College with a lecture by Nicholas Grene, The Modernity of Thomas Kilroy. The following day features panel discussions of his work, rounded off by a staged reading of his as-yet-unperformed play Blake by the Abbey Theatre, directed by Patrick Mason, at 8pm in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. It’s all organised by the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, part of Trinity’s school of English, in association with the university’s Long Room Hub , the Abbey and Unesco City of Literature.
Broadsides against a Baghdad car bomb
In 2007 a car bomb destroyed Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, home to printers, bookshops and literary cafes, and a haunt of intellectual debate for generations. Organised by San Francisco’s Great Overland Books and Bristol University, American and European artists responded by producing broadsides featuring words and images as a mark of artistic solidarity. You can see 30 of these in an exhibition at Dublin Central Library, the Ilac Centre, from March 14th to 28th. A panel discussion there on Saturday, March 19th, at 3pm, entitled Art as Reply, will be introduced by the writer Evelyn Conlon (above). Chaired by Prof Michael Cronin, it will include Helen Carey, curator of 1913 Forum on public art; the novelist Sean O’Reilly reading work from Iraq; and Hazim Alansary, an Iraqi artist living in Ireland. Admission is free, but booking is essential on openlearning@ dublincity.ie or 01-8734333.
William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen story contest
A prize of €2,500 and a laptop are on offer for the winner of the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, entry for which is now open. Stories must be no more than 3,000 words, and submitted by April 29th. Five runners-up will each get a prize of €200. The short-story writer John MacKenna will be the final arbiter, picking a winner from a shortlist of about 25 stories. Entries, by post only, to 37 Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown, Co Cork. See mitchelstownlit.com.
Waterford Writers Weekend gets ready
Former taoiseach (and current Irish Times columnist) Garret FitzGerald talking about his life and his recent biography, Just Garret; readings by the poets Thomas McCarthy and Leanne O’Sullivan, and by the novelists Ed O’Loughlin and Peter Murphy, are among the highlights of Waterford Writers Weekend, from March 18th to 20th. Workshops include an introduction to creative writing facilitated by Nicole Rourke of Big Smoke Writing Factory, plus ones on writing for theatre, and how to get published. The Seán Dunne Young Writers’ Awards, in honour of the late Waterford poet, will also be presented during the weekend; waterfordwritersweekend.ie.
Hugo Hamilton gives free Trinity writing workshops
Hugo Hamilton, the novelist and memoirist , most notably of The Speckled People, and currently TCD’s writer fellow (a post organised by the school of English and the Arts Council) will give a free writing workshop in the college from 6pm to 9pm and 10am to 1pm on Friday and Saturday, March 25th and 26th, and again on Friday and Saturday, April 1st and 2nd. One imagines a stampede of budding scribes will seek places. Applicants should post a piece of prose not longer than 1,000 words to the college’s Oscar Wilde Centre by March 18th; see tcd.ie/owc.
