Five Pulitzer and two Booker prizewinners. A modest enough offering for the Aran Islands International Prose and Poetry Festival next year.
Robert Pinsky, US poet laureate; Joyce Carol Oates, author of several dozen novels and shortstory collections and many works of poetry, drama and criticism; Michael Ondaatje, Booker McConnell prizewinning author of The English Patient; Edna O'Brien, Frank McCourt, Roddy Doyle and Eavan Boland; just some of the internationally-acclaimed authors and poets booked to participate next August.
Xue Di, the Chinese dissident poet and one of the free leaders of the Tiananmen Square revolt; and the Chilean author, Marjorie Agosin, winner of many awards, including the Latino Literature prize and the Morgan Institute prize for Achievement in Human Rights, will also contribute. The venue for most of it will be the mainland location of NUI Galway.
The university will have a significant input into the programme, running from August 15th to 21st, according to Dr Ruth Curtis, vice-president of NUI Galway. There will be major lectures on James Joyce, J.M. Synge and W.B. Yeats by Prof Kevin Barry, Dr Riana O'Dwyer and Dr Pat Sheeran respectively. A special "feature" will be "Aran Islands Day", when poets and authors will travel to Inis Mor to give readings with island-based colleagues.
Organised in association with Comharchumann Inis Mor, it will involve Cathal O Searcaigh, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Tim Pat Coogan, Edna O'Brien, John Montague and Frank McCourt.
The festival owes its origins to Daniel Doyle jun, executive director of the Young Writers' Institute at the Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut. The institute administers a mentor programme, in which more than 50 freshman and sophomore writers have their work evaluated by professional writers.
Phyllis Browne's love story of her life with the late Dr Noel Browne should have sold quite a few copies by then. And a love story it is, according to the Galway West Labour TD and close friend, Michael D. Higgins, who spoke at a function to mark the publication in Kenny's Bookshop, Galway, on Friday night. "A construction of such a story through the memory of a partnership" is how he described it at the reception attended by Phyllis and her daughter, Ruth.
The account of a painful childhood moves into what is a vignette of Ireland at a very different time; evocative of a period that some people might find hard to remember, Mr Higgins said. "In fact, most of the book is structured around the memories pegged between two atmospheres of Trinity College Dublin, that brief carefree period when the couple did things like cross the cobblestones to meet after breakfast and go out on excursions to Wicklow, and much later in 1994, when Noel describes the TCD honorary fellowship as one of the loveliest days of his life. "Between those two posts is a series of insights, for instance, what it was like to be part of a family whose background was Protestant in the 1930s, when Protestants couldn't get public positions. And there is the return of the spectre of illness and of TB, which touched them both."
When Noel entered the world of politics, one could "hear a door being banged" on the private world, he said. The book deals only briefly with the former health minister's Mother and Child Scheme and subsequent clash with the Hierarchy in 1950-51.
"It is a book that is inextricably linked with the kind of life described in Noel's own work, Against the Tide. And yet this is not a rerun of that at all, but about what was happening at home: Phyllis's story, the experiments at supplementing income by keeping hens, and the hopelessness of keeping animals that you are going to like so much and won't be able to sell. An amateur farmer's journal."
And an important marker, at a time when Galway is embroiled in the row about threatened cutbacks at the regional hospital. The couple who had so much love for each other devoted their lives to providing the social services we now enjoy - often taken for granted - and threatened by a Government's fear of an accountant's pen.
Thanks for the Tea, Mrs Browne by Phyllis Browne is published by New Island Books at £6.99.