Given the widespread critical acclaim it received and the power of the tale it tells, it's not surprising Neil Jordan has bought the film rights to Hugo Hamilton's memoir, The Speckled People.
Stephen Durbridge of London literary agents The Agency says Jordan will be working on the screenplay himself. Meanwhile, the book's triumphant passage continues. Already translated into numerous European languages, it will be published in Germany next month, which must be fascinating for its author who grew up in Ireland with a German mother and a violent father obsessive about his Irishness - and that of his children. The special childhood that that parentage provided is magnificently explored in The Speckled People, from the schoolchildren who called Hamilton and his siblings Nazis to the memories of Germany their mother evoked. Reviewing the memoir in The Irish Times this time last year, George Szirtes said Hamilton's drawing of his mother was one of the most substantially affectionate portraits of a parent he had read.
Who'll play her, one wonders, in the movie?
Paterson takes Eliot prize
So, no Irish winner this year of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2003, in spite of two potential candidates on the shortlist - Bernard O'Donoghue and John F. Deane. When Valerie Eliot handed over the £10,000 cheque at Lancaster House in London on Monday night, it went instead to Scottish poet Don Paterson, the first poet to win the prize twice since its inception in 1993. He first won in 1997 with God's Gift to Women. Chairman of the judges, George Szirtes said the winning collection, Landing Light (Faber), judged to be the best collection of new poetry published in the UK and Ireland last year, was Paterson's most accomplished and spiritual collection to date, offering what Eliot demanded: "complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible; and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water". Paterson's work, said Szirtes, was superbly authoritative, deeply playful and properly ambitious. The prize, awarded by the Poetry Book Society, was once described by poet Andrew Motion as the one most poets want to win. Paterson (40) will give inspiration to early school leavers - he left at 16 because, he says, he couldn't wait to be a guitar player. He went on to have a successful career with a jazz ensemble called Lammas. The Dundee-born poet, after years in London, is now back in Scotland, where he teaches creative writing at St Andrew's University. He's also a poetry editor with Picador. However, his next book won't be of poetry - he's working on The Book of Shadows, a book of aphorisms. www.poetrybooks.co.uk
Speranza extravaganza
The bright young women dashing across Front Square in Trinity College, Dublin, probably have no idea how lucky they are to be there because it wasn't always thus. It's only 100 years since, on January 16th, 1904, King Edward VII sent a letter to the university's provost saying it was legal to admit women. The date is now remembered at the college as King's Letter Day. The centenary will be celebrated next Tuesday with an evening in the college called "Speranza's Daughters". Chaired by Prof Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, it will feature readings by the current TCD Writer Fellow, Anne Devlin, and two writers who are graduates in creative writing from the TCD's Oscar Wilde Centre, Jean O'Brien and Claire Keegan. It was when the college was celebrating its tercentenary in 1892 that a push was made to remove the ban on women; 10,000 signatures were collected in favour, but initially the board thought to move might be illegal.
The tale will be fully told this year in A Danger to the Men? A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin 1904-2004, a book edited by Susan Parkes, which will be published by Lilliput in May.
Another celebration is scheduled in March in honour of what were known as the Oxbridge Steamboat Ladies. Unable to have degrees conferred on them by Oxford and Cambridge at the time, they travelled over on the boat, stayed a night and got conferred by Trinity before making the return journey.
Speranza's Daughters takes place at 7.30 p.m. on next Tuesday in the Thomas Davis Theatre, Arts Building, TCD. Entrance: 5