FICTION writer James Ryan is having a busy and interesting time these days. His first novel, Home from England, which was published to critical acclaim in hardback last year and which went into two paperback printings in as many months this summer, is due to be filmed by Plurabelle, Gabriel Byrne's New York based production company.
The two first met at a signing session for Home from England in Kenny's of Galway more than a year ago. The actor went off and read the book and was so taken by its movie possibilities that when he was filming Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow in Copenhagen last May, he flew the writer over to discuss the matter.
Now a full contract has just been signed by both parties, and James has been contracted to write the screenplay, which he is doing at the moment. No fee has been set (it will all be in the percentages, he says), and a director and cast have yet to be lined up, but filming is expected to start here next year.
That's not all the Laois born writer is doing. Having signed a £25,000 "piecemeal" contract with his publisher Phoenix House for two further books, and having received an Arts Council bursary to help write the first of these, he now has a new novel "due for delivery". Set in both Ireland and the United States, this will be in the shops next year.
Given such a level of activity, it's just as well that his other career as teacher of history and English at Newpark School in Blackrock is currently on a job share basis, thus enabling him to grapple with the screenplay.
HAVING denounced the Booker contest, of which he was one of the judges, A.N. Wilson has done the honourable thing and given his £3,000 fee to charity.
Writing in the Evening Standard after the Booker had been awarded to Graham Swift, Wilson moaned that he had spent six months reading 150 novels and that "the great majority were of no quality at all".
The novel he favoured, Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself didn't win, causing him to observe: "I did not expect to mind about this so much, but it has actually filled me with revulsion against the whole prize - its silly dinner, and the pretentious suggestion that somehow, like the Prix Goncourt, it was conferring `status' on the winner. In fact, it is all a commercial game."
But he didn't leave it at that: "The Booker died ages ago, and it is now running around like a farmyard chicken with no head. It would be a good idea if we could announce that there would be no more Booker prizes from now on."
In the same newspaper a few days earlier, former Booker winner V.S. Naipaul went even further: "The Booker is murder. Absolutely nothing would be lost if it withered away and died. It is useless. I have no regard for it at all. No one knows what a novel is any more - it is all foolish. All novels written now are debris."
However, unlike Wilson, who has generously donated his cheque to the Distressed Gentlefolks Aid Association, Naipaul doesn't mention anything about giving his own prize money away.
MEANWHILE, the 1896 Booker Prize, mentioned in this column recently and organised to coincide with its modern equivalent, has been awarded to H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau.
Being dead, the writers can't benefit from the award, but the proposer can send a set of Everyman paperbacks to the institution of his or her choice. In 1994, Victoria Glendinning, who proposed George Moore's Esther Waters, gave the books to a North London school last year Melvyn Bragg, who proposed Hardy's Jude the Obscure, gave his set to a school in Cumbria and this year's proposer, Rachel Billington, is sending them to a prison library.
PROVING that there is competitive life after the Nobel, Seamus Heaney is among the ten poets shortlisted for the 1996 £5,000 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the winner of which will be announced on January 13th.
The prize is for the best collection of new poetry and the contenders are: Ciaran Carson for Opera Et Cetera, Maura Dooley for Kissing a Bone, John Fuller for Stones and Fire, Seamus Heaney for The Spirit Level, Stephen Knight for Dream City Cinema, Adrian Mitchell for Blue Coffee, Les Murray for Subhuman Redneck Poems, Alice Oswald for The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, Christopher Reid for Expanded Universes, and Susan Wicks for The Clever Daughter.
AND speaking of poetry prizes, I should remind you that the closing date for the Friends Provident Poetry Competition is November 29th (that's next Friday). This year, in fact, there are two prizes - £1,000 for the best overall poem and £250 for the best poem by an unpublished poet. Entry forms and other details can be obtained from either Friends Provident or Poetry Ireland.