TWO striking pieces of news in one week: a cool million to English writer Jenny Colgan for her first, as yet unpublished, novel, and a half-million to Nuala O Faolain for hers. Dublin financier Paul Kilduff can't quite match either of those extraordinary (some would say mystifying) figures, yet his own first novel, due out in June, has already netted him what he terms "a high five-figure sum".
He sent the first three chapters of the novel, which is called Square Mile and which he describes as a financial thriller, to several London publishers, "but I received back either rejection slips or nothing at all. Later I sent the same chapters to London literary agents and got immediate interest from five of them".
The recent rash of financial scandals and turmoil in world stock markets, he says, made the book very timely, and he's pleased that he eventually signed to Hodder & Stoughton, who are "well disposed to Irish authors".
Educated at UCD, 34-year-old Paul moved to London in 1989 and worked with a US securities house and an international banking group before returning to Dublin in 1995 where he is currently vice president with a US investment bank in the Irish Financial Services Centre.
He is currently completing his second novel, The Dealer, due for publication next year.
GIVEN these facts, Irish writing still seems to be in great demand abroad, yet London's first festival of language and literature, which begins on March 19th, includes just one Irish participant, Robert McLiam Wilson, in a line-up the organisers are extolling as "sixty of the world's finest writers".
In other words, no room could be found among the sixty for such obviously marginal writers as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, William Trevor, John Banville, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Patrick McCabe, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Longley, Carlo Gebler and Roddy Doyle.
WHEN John Hannah read that Auden poem at the end of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, he did more for the author's sales than anyone could have imagined. In fact, the slim volume of Auden's verse rush-released to tie in with the movie sold a staggering 200,000 copies - more than the entire sales of Auden during the poet's lifetime.
Now, with the success of the movie Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes seem all set to do the same for the Bard. More than 50,000 copies of Faber's film-linked Love Poetry of William Shakespeare, which includes sonnets, love lyrics , scenes from Romeo and Juliet and glossy pics of Paltrow and Fiennes, have already been ordered by bookshops in these islands and, given the movie's thirteen Oscar nominations, these are expected to sell out in next to no time. The same phenomenon is likely in America.
You've seen the movie, now read the book. It used to be the other way round. Times certainly change.
I have a fondness for poetry broadsheets, possibly because, during what might loosely be called my formative years, I featured in a couple of them myself, and I certainly like the new Kilkenny Poetry broadsheet, both for its design and its substance.
Produced by Kilkenny County Council's arts office, this first issue, devoted to writers born or resident in the county, was edited by Mark Roper, who has chosen eleven arresting poems from the hundred-plus submitted for inclusion.
I was especially taken by Gillian Somerville-Large's "Saint Nicholas", Eliza Dear's "My Son", Kathleen O'Driscoll's "Observations on the Riverbank" and Anne McDarby's "Naked", but there isn't a duff poem here - Mr Roper, a fine poet himself, knows good work when he sees it.
The cost of the broadsheet is £1, and it will be launched in Bennettsbridge's community hall next Wednesday at 8pm.
NOT to be outdone by its country cousin, Dublin Corporation, through its public libraries service, has just published an interesting and informative 36-page booklet, Irish Gothic Writers, which is subtitled "Bram Stoker and the Irish Supernatural Tradition".
Written and illustrated by Sean Lennon, who is librarian in Marino, it examines the work of such Irish writers as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu and Stoker, relates them to their English and American counterparts, and also details the history of vampires in movies.
You can get Sean's engrossing study, which costs £2.50, from any Dublin Corporation library or major bookshop.
MARY CLAYTON, Professor of Old and Middle English in University College Dublin, tells me that Seamus Heaney will be reading from his forthcoming modern English version of Beowulf next Tuesday at noon in Theatre L, UCD. And you don't have to be a student of Old English to go along and hear him - everyone is welcome to attend.