Guess who's got a collection?The short stories that Roddy Doyle (who on Wednesday won the €10,000 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award for Paula Spencer) has been writing in recent years for Metro Éireann will form the basis of his first short story collection, writes Caroline Walsh.
Called The Deportees, it's out in September from Jonathan Cape. The stories take a new slant on the immigrant experience - Metro Éireann having been started by, and aimed at immigrants to Ireland. Stories include Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in which a father, delighted with his open-mindedness, has to confront his real feelings when one of his daughters brings home a black boyfriend. In 57% Irish, Ray Brady tries to devise a test of Irishness by measuring reactions to Robbie Keane's goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup, Riverdance and Danny Boy, while in the title story Jimmy Rabbitte, Commitments founder, returns and decides it's time to found a new band only this time it's a case of "no white Irish need apply".
Underground above board
Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, JP Donleavy and Anthony Cronin were among the regulars in the Catacombs, the legendary club in the basement of 13 Fitzwilliam Place in Dublin in the late 1940s. Repression may have been rampant elsewhere but not in the Catacombs, founded by Englishman Dickie Wyman who moved to Dublin after the death of his boyfriend during the second World War. He opened the club in the flat he rented and made money by returning empty bottles the morning after the night before. It gained immortality when Behan described it as a place where "men had women, men had men and women had women". Archbishop John Charles McQuaid may have kept the flock in check above ground but things were different in Fitzwilliam Place.
One Saturday last month, RTÉ Radio 1's Documentary on One team brought four former patrons JP Donleavy, Steve Willoughby, Joan De Frenay and Sheila Bradshaw back to the site. The last time they'd walked down those narrow stairs was 60 years ago. The resulting radio programme, made and presented by Ciaran Cassidy, and billed as a snapshot of what it was like to be young and talented in Dublin all those decades ago is broadcast on Wed, June 13th, at 8pm on RTÉ Radio 1.
A celebration of Hewitt
The annual John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh, on July 23rd-26th, will also be a celebration of the poet's birth in 1907. Writers, artists, academics, critics, musicians and politicians are taking part. There will be a special emphasis on poetry, with readings by poets including Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Nessa O'Mahony, Sinéad Morrissey and Cathal Ó Searcaigh; John Wakeman and poets associated with The Shop, his poetry journal will also be there. John Banville, Billy Roche, Ronan Bennett, Anne Enright, Aminatta Forna, Fintan O'Toole, Jonathan Bardon and TP Flanagan are also taking part and Edna Longley, former academic director of the summer school, returns to talk about Hewitt and that other great Northern poet, Louis MacNeice. Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, whose book A Tragedy of Errors: the Government and Misgovernment of Northern Ireland is just out, will speak on the opening day while soprano Angela Feeney will perform A Touch of Things, a song cycle based on Hewitt's work, composed by Peter Downey and commissioned by The John Hewitt Society to mark the centenary. Meanwhile, a volume of Selected Poems by John Hewitt, edited by Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby, who have jointly written an introduction, has just been published by Blackstaff (£7.99) www.johnhewitt.org
Poets head for Herts
If it feels like the country is denuded of poets at the end of the month, it's because a cohort of them have headed for Hertfordshire. The Irish presence at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which runs from June 29th to July 8th, is huge. Greg Delanty, Iggy McGovern, Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin, Bernard O'Donoghue, Caitriona O'Reilly, Paula Meehan, Tony Curtis, Pat Boran, Paddy Bushe, Theo Dorgan, Micheál Ó Siadhail, Medbh McGuckian and Sinéad Morrissey are among the Irish poets descending on the medieval town in the Malvern Hills, along with short story writer and novelist Bernard MacLaverty.
James Fenton, George Szirtes and AL Kennedy are among the participants, and attractions include a trip to Hope End Garden where Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent her childhood. There's also a trip in the footsteps of WH Auden, who taught at the Downs School in Colwall in the 1930s. "No dogs please," says the website. www.poetry-festival.com