Rooney gets to award his prize as ambassador:When Dan Rooney established the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, in 1975, few people could have imagined not only that it would still be going strong decades later but also that one day he'd be presenting it to the winner as US ambassador to Ireland, in his gracious residence in the Phoenix Park, with the Dublin park's herd of deer gambolling outside.
Fellow writers Carlo Gébler, Kevin Power, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Gerald Dawe and Brian Lynch were among the throng saluting this year’s winner, the poet Leanne O’Sullivan, to whom fellow poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin paid the ultimate compliment. Quoting from O’Sullivan’s poem Hazel – “I am waist-deep in it, pulling myself / up from the ground, the thirsting earth, / rising from it with my green feast” – Ní Chuilleanáin told the gathering: “I wish I’d written that.”
She praised O'Sullivan, who is from the Beara Peninsula, in west Cork, for her boldness in confronting her themes, whether personal or folkloric, calling her "a poet of line, with an eye that follows the line deeper and deeper into the poem". O'Sullivan, who is the author of two collections, Waiting for My Clothesand Cailleach: The Hag of Beara, said that particularly now, as she was writing full time, "having a period of apprenticeship", the recognition of an award like this was invaluable. The prize is given annually to a published Irish writer under 40 who is deemed to show outstanding promise. As well as a €10,000 cheque, the ambassador presented O'Sullivan with the traditional gift of a shirt of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the US football team of which he is chairman.
Gone but not forgotten: new books by Tony Judt
Followers of the historian, essayist and public intellectual Tony Judt, who died this summer at the age of 62, will be glad to know his unique voice isn't stilled quite yet. Next month Heinemann publishes The Memory Chalet, a collection of the moving essays he wrote during his illness, mainly for the New York Review of Books.
“It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head,” said Judt, and that he had – almost without peer. From his ancestral links to eastern Europe through his grandfather, who was born in Warsaw, and several of whose relatives died in the Holocaust, to his own working class English-Jewish background, his education at Cambridge and his participation in the student demonstrations of the 1960s, Judt had a rich mine to explore once he began to write his own story, in the final two years of his life.
He also completed Thinking the Twentieth Century,a book about the life of the mind in the past 100 years and his own intellectual evolution. He had started work on it in 2008, the year he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, composing it with the help of the Yale historian Timothy Snyder. They finished it a few weeks before Judt died.
