LooseLeaves Caroline WalshIt's official. Bloomsday is now the longest day of the year, having been stretched by the James Joyce Centre to last from tomorrow until June 17th. The day itself, June 16th 1904, on which Ulysses is set, is about to be celebrated in so many ways in Dublin over the coming week that you'd need to be Ronnie Delaney to get to all of them.
Given Joyce's love of and talent for music, it is fitting that so many of the events at the centre, in 35 North Great George's Street, are musical.
The Music of Joyce's Dublin, an odyssey through what was prevalent in the city in his era, with soprano Katie Brown, takes place on Monday at 8pm, while on Wednesday, also at 8pm, there's a showing of the documentary, Bloomsday Cabaret, exploring music in the writer's work and life. Singer Paul Harrington will perform after the screening.
On Friday at 8pm and again on Sunday, June 17th, at 4pm, Molly Says No! will see soprano Judith Mok and pianist Kevin Sharpe performing music Molly Bloom would have loved, by Mozart, Bizet and Schubert.
On the day itself, June 16th, at noon and 3pm, the four-person group Joyce in Voice, from Glasgow, will sing music from Ulysses. Later, at 8 pm, one of the week's major events takes place: Himself and Nora, a preview of highlights from a new musical by composer/lyricist Jonathan Brielle.
There's also the annual breakfast (which now runs to three sittings), various readings, and (tomorrow) a showing at 3pm of two films by Ian Graham, Joyce: The Journey Home, about the restoration of 35 North Great George's Street, and The Trials of Ulysses, about the novel's battles against charges of obscenity.
On Tuesday at 8pm there's a showing of a new film, Dublin Day, by director George Morrison, in which the director of Mise Éire offers what is billed as a Joycean celebration of the capital city as it is now and as it was at the turn of the 20th century.
Running from June 14th to 16th is In Medias Res, an exhibition in which artist David Lilburn shows a multilayered work mapping the Dublin of Ulysses and the contemporary city, with Lilburn on hand to talk about it all.
Towards the close of the Bloomsfest, Joycean and Irish Times journalist Terence Killeen will talk on The Origins of Ulysses (at noon on June 17th).
Many of the events have a modest fee, but some are free and don't even require a booking. Details from www.jamesjoyce.ie or 01-8788547.
Orange bears fruit
The fact that the two awards made at the Orange Broadband Prize ceremony on Wednesday went to books about turmoil and strife was not lost on those attending the ceremony in London's Royal Festival Hall. As well as the main £30,000 (€44,135) prize going to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (29), right, for Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria during the Biafran war in the 1960s, the secondary £10,000 (€14,712) bursary for new writers went to Canadian Karen Connelly (38), below, for The Lizard Cage, about a protest singer against the Burmese dictatorship in the late 1980s, who's arrested and is doing time in solitary confinement.
"Because everything is so terrible in the world, perhaps there is a hunger now for serious books about war through fiction," said the founder of the prize scheme, Kate Mosse.
Writer Jackie Kay, chairwoman of the judges' panel for the new writers' award, praised Connelly's book for its depiction of the way the human spirit can survive the greatest brutality; it was a book to "raise the spirits", she said. Meanwhile, the judges' chairwoman for the main award, Muriel Gray, said Half of a Yellow Sun was a moving and important book by an incredibly exciting author. Irish novelist Marian Keyes was among the judges for this award.
The Silk Road to Lismore
Chinese writer Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, who have been described as "a yin and yang of exotic glamour and scholarly erudition" will be at the Lismore Festival of Travel Writing in Co Waterford next week (June 15-17th), where the theme this year is the ancient trading route, the Silk Road.
Jung Chang, who sprang to worldwide attention when her family memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, became an international bestseller, went on to write a life of chairman Mao with her husband. Wild Swans is still banned in China, and Mao: the Unknown Story was not published there either. Alexandra Tolstoy, author of The Last Secrets of the Silk Road, will also be at the festival.