Doing the write thing...

The Dublin Book Festival will be free again this year, despite cuts in funding for publishers, writers and arts organisations. That’s the message from the event, which will run in City Hall from March 6th to 8th. “The success of the festival is rooted in the fact that it makes literature accessible to everyone. A cover charge would be contrary to its inclusive ethos,” says its creative director (and president of Publishing Ireland), Alan Hayes.

More than 100 writers and journalists will feature at over 50 readings, debates, interviews and events for children, and it’s hoped that last year’s attendance record of 11,000-plus will be broken.

Public discussions are a major part of this now annual festival. A sign of the times this year is one called Surviving Redundancy, featuring Lisa O'Callaghan, Andrew McCann and Frank Scott-Lennon. Others include Rewriting Ireland's Rebel History, with Diarmaid Ferriter, Ruan O'Donnell and Niamh O'Sullivan; Critiquing the Critics – the Art of Literary Reviewing,with Carlo Gébler, Greg Baxter and Siobhán Parkinson; and Celebrating 100 Years of Irish-Language Novels, with Máirín Nic Eoin, Brian Ó Conchubhair and Sorcha de Brún.

Mary Kenny, Thomas Kilroy and Gordon Snell are among the interviewees in separate "In Conversation" slots, as is Irish TimesLiterary Correspondent Eileen Battersby. The author of Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty, published recently, she will be talking to Declan Meade of the Stinging Fly, and she'll also take part, with Sergio Marras, in a tribute to late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño .

Shane Hegarty, another Irish Timesjournalist (there are lots at the festival) and author of The Irish (and Other Foreigners)will speak at an event followed, appropriately, by Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland, a discussion with Hugo Hamilton, Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó, and readings by Enrique Juncosa, Anatoly Kudryavitsky and others.

Poets participating include Theo Dorgan, Geraldine Mills, Paddy Bushe, Pól Ó Muirí, Rosita Boland, Gerald Dawe, Kerry Hardie and Joan McBreen. Fiction writers Claire Keegan and Molly McCloskey will read, while Malachi O'Doherty and Eibhear Walshe are on the panel in Writing Lives, in which writers will tease out issues around writing about real people’s lives. Gerry Thornley, Gavin Cummiskey and Liam Toland will discuss sportswriting.

As the festival ends on International Women's Day, women will be a strong presence on its final day. A posthumous book from Nuala Ó Faolain, A More Complex Truth: Selected Writings, is to be launched, while The Legacies of Feminismwill be debated by Susan McKay, Ivana Bacik, Caitríona Crowe and Margaret MacCurtain, chaired by Anthea McTeirnan. Full details at dublinbookfestival.com.

Gurnah in Maynooth

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah will feature in a number of public events at NUI Maynooth this month. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, he moved to Britain as a refugee in 1968 and is now professor of English at the University of Kent. He is the author of seven novels, including By The Sea, and will give a reading from his latest novel, Desertion, on Tuesday, February 23rd at 7pm in the John Hume Building, Hall 1, on North Campus. The next day, he will give a seminar, How to Publish your Creative Writing, and attend a symposium on his work. A limited number of (free) places are available at these Wednesday events.

To book, tel: 01-7083706 or e-mail ide.corley@nuim.ie.