Come summer time, festivals are two-a-penny in Ireland - indeed the whole island is in danger of becoming the living embodiment of a David Lodge novel. However, a literary festival that kicks off on August 15th has a line-up that demands attention.
Speakers coming to the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival include the American poet laureate, Robert Pinsky; novelists Michael Ondaatje and Frank McCourt; the Chinese dissident poet, Xui Di, and Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Rita Dove.
The title of the festival conjures up a lovely image of these international authors plying currachs across to the islands, but most of the week-long event takes place in the O'Flaherty Lecture Theatre in NUI Galway. However, on August 18th, Aran Islands Day will see authors including Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Edna O'Brien, Tim Pat Coogan and poets Cathal O Searcaigh and John Montague making the trip to Inis Mor for a day of readings with Aran Island poets.
Other speakers include William Kennedy, author of Ironweed; novelist Hugo Hamilton; poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill; Chilean author Marjorie Agosin; and poet Ciaran Carson. For information, phone 091750418.
Talk about high productivity: Colm Toibin has been busy again. The latest work with his name attached to hit the shops is a small volume called The Irish Famine, which is published by Profile Books. While we in Ireland may be a bit Famine-ed out at this stage, Toibin's extended essay has gone down well in Britain, where it was serialised by the Guardian a couple of weeks ago.
At 85 pages, The Irish Famine comes complete with lithographs from the Illustrated London News. In the essay, Toibin looks at the history of writing about the Famine, both historical and fictional, and examines why the folklore archive was ignored for so long and why the period was dealt with so scantily in Irish literature.
This work comes hot on the heels of The Modern Library, Toibin's joint project with Carmen Calill. It will be followed by a novel, The Blackwater Lightship, which is due out in September.
Later in the autumn, the industrious Toibin will be wetting the head of another literary offspring: The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. Some 1,400 pages long and spanning Irish literature from Jonathan Swift to Emma Donoghue, it promises to be the Field Day Anthology in one volume. Let the debates begin.
The Fallen Leaves Short Story Competition was dreamed up three years ago to promote the idea of writing stories for radio. The competition, run jointly by Cork Campus Radio 97.4 FM, the Examiner and the Cork University Press, has a reputation that is echoed in the writers who have agreed to judge it over the years: Fergal Keane, Colum McCann and Evelyn Conlon, to name a few.
This year's adjudicators are Joseph O'Connor and Bernadette Leach, and the winners will get a cash prize as well as the opportunity to have their work featured on air. The closing date for entries is September 24th, and competition details are available from Sinead O'Donnell at Cork Campus Radio, tel: 021-902170.
Next Tuesday in the Irish Writers' Centre, Books Upstairs is presenting a reading by novelist Emma Donoghue. The 21-year-old bookstore proudly proclaims itself the first stockist of gay and lesbian books, and this reading fits into that tradition.
Donoghue, known for her novels Stir Fry and Hood, will be reading from her latest, The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories, which also contains work by Mary Dorcey, Dorothy Allison and Patricia Duncker. All are welcome for the reading, which starts at 8 p.m..
Anyone who has been stalled in the rather uninspiring lay-bys Iarnroid Eireann always seems to choose for its train delays, might see fit to demand a service now offered by Northern Spirit, the train company operating between London and Scotland. It has recently appointed Ian McMillan as poet in residence, a post McMillan also holds in Barnesley Football Club.
McMillan will be expected to write verses celebrating rail travel which will be printed on trains and rail tickets, as well as to give readings. Perhaps a public competition could be run to find our own poet-in-motion, but any entries which start "Slower than hedges, slower than ditches . . ." should be disqualified automatically.