A round-up of today's other stories in brief...
For whom the margin bell tolls at Flat Lake
It has been called the quirkiest of all Irish festivals, and, living up to that name, this year’s Flat Lake Literary Arts Festival, at Hilton Park in Clones, Co Monaghan, is dedicated to what is almost a relic of a bygone era: the typewriter. Long live the typewriter, they say, moved to fete the apparatus after reading reports that its production is, inevitably, on the wane. “Bring us your typewriters and we will think of something arty and imaginative to do with them all . . . If it’s good enough for Mark Twain, it’s good enough for us,” says Kevin Allen, the founder with the writer Pat McCabe of the festival, which opens on Friday and runs until tomorrow week. Writers in the line-up include John Banville, Joe Queenan, Ulick O’Connor, Anthony Cronin, Louis de Paor, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Anne Haverty, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Claire Kilroy and Peter Murphy – and that’s on top of loads of music. Trad players will keep the campfire alight all weekend, new shorts will be shown in the film festival tent, and children, they promise, will be able to use the smallest fully sprung dance floor in Ireland. See theflatlakefestival.com.
‘Super Sad’ a super success at Wodehouse award
The very English Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction has been won by an American for the first time. Gary Shteyngart, one of the New Yorkermagazine's "20 under 40" writers to watch out for, takes the award for his dystopian novel set in a US on the brink of collapse, Super Sad True Love Story (Granta). Previous winners of the prize, which celebrates fiction that captures the spirit of PG Wodehouse, include Ian McEwan, Howard Jacobson, DBC Pierre and Marina Lewycka. The winning citation hailed Shteyngart as a staggeringly clever satirist, adding: "This is great literature and it's wild comedy." The author gets a load of Bollinger and the Everyman Wodehouse collection, as well as having a Gloucestershire old spot pig named after his novel.
Poetry in Motion at Summer’s Wreath talks
The former British poet laureate Andrew Motion is among those taking part in the National Library of Ireland’s fifth Summer’s Wreath programme, celebrating WB Yeats, which takes place next month. Motion will give a lecture titled Celtic Fever, on the influence of Yeats on the poetry of Philip Larkin, on Thursday, June 23rd, at 8pm. Another participant is the historian and Yeats biographer Roy Foster, whose latest book, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances, came out last month. He’ll take part in a conversation with fellow scholar Joseph M Hassett, whose WB Yeats and the Muses was published last year, on Monday, June 13th, also at 8pm. Other participants include Fergal Keane, the writer, broadcaster and presenter of the recent series The Story of Ireland; the novelist and memoir writer Hugo Hamilton; and the actor Kate O’Toole (above). On Saturday, June 18th, at 8pm, the event Yeats in Words and Music will feature readings by the singer and actor Andrea Corr and music by Liam O’Flynn. Some events are free, others are fee-paying. See nli.ie.
Artemis Fowl author on Andersen prize list
It’s a long, long lead-in time – the winners won’t be announced until March 19th next year, at Bologna Children’s Book Fair – but the Irish author Eoin Colfer has been nominated for the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Awards. They are presented every two years by the International Board on Books for Young People to an author and an illustrator whose works are felt to have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature. National sections of the board have nominated 28 authors and 31 illustrators for next year’s gongs. The British author Philip Pullman is also nominated.
