Irish prepare for Edinburgh invasionWhen the Edinburgh International Book Festival kicks off in Charlotte Square Gardens on August 9th, a Pied Piper's parade of Irish writers will be on the menu. Jennifer Johnston, Deirdre Madden, Glenn Patterson, Claire Kilroy, Catherine Dunne, Keith Ridgway, Patrick McCabe, Thomas Pakenham, Colum McCann, Hugo Hamilton, Michael Collins, Clare Boylan, Fintan O'Toole, Eoin Colfer and Herbie Brennan are among the strong Irish contingent, reflecting the rich harvest of current Irish writing.
Politically, the festival always has an eye to current affairs, ensuring debates of contemporary relevance. The subject of what to do about dictators will be addressed by Christopher Hope and Doris Lessing, focusing on their mutual homeland of South Africa, Robert Mugabe and "the intractable problems of tyranny". Mother and son Susan Sontag and David Rieff will be there - Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, to analyse how humanitarian missions are often betrayed and misused in a violent world, and Sontag to talk about her new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, due imminently from Hamish Hamilton. It explores how photographs determine our responses to - and maybe even determine - the nature of war itself. Middle East expert Dilip Hiro will talk on war and terrorism, Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, is just out, will speak on the private "court" that surrounded the dictator during the years of terror which left 10 million dead in the former Soviet Union, while sociologist Richard Sennett will argue the case for the importance of respect as a force for social cohesion in a world beset by inequality.
Russian novelist Andrei Makine, Samuel Pepys award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin and literary critic James Wood, who, since the publication of his début novel, The Book Against God, is facing his public from the other side of the fence, are among the many other writers participating before it all draws to a close on August 25th. www.edbookfest.co.uk
Saved by the bell
Tom Paulin had a packed house in the old Physics Theatre in UCD at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, on Tuesday night for his lecture on "The North and Criticism Since 1960". As often happens, things started hotting up at the end of the session. Clair Wills, one of the editors of volumes four and five of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, was asking Paulin (who promisingly had just removed his jacket as if for freer engagement), where women fitted into his theories and equations when, like a clarion call from a long-lost era, a bell started clanging in the corridor outside to indicate time was up and we had to let them close up for the night.
It was part of the Madden-Rooney public lecture series organised by the Irish Seminar 2003: Notre Dame Dublin, which continues next Tuesday when Kevin Whelan will speak on "Can Emmet's Epitaph Now Be Written?". Paul Muldoon will give a poetry reading on Friday, July 18th, while on Tuesday, the 22nd, there will be a lecture by academic David Lloyd. Starting time for all events, which are free and open to the public, is 8 p.m. Tel: 01-4189172; e-mail: irishsem@nd.edu; website: www.nd.edu/~irishsem
Getting creative
Creative writing courses usually centre on fiction or poetry, so it's interesting to hear of a forthcoming one on non-fiction.
How to inject creative energy into such genres as memoir, history, travel writing, polemic, biography etc will be tackled by Áine McCarthy, who teaches literature at the Women's Education Research and Resource Centre in UCD and at the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin. The venue is the United Arts Club, 3 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2, July 19th-20th; cost €150. Details from 01-8532356
Reward for reportage
Violent events in places as far apart as Chechnya, Rwanda, Afghanistan and New York have shown the public how superficial the familiarity the audio-visual mass media purports to have with cultures and conflicts worldwide really is; that's the premise behind a new award for reportage literature, the first of which will be bestowed in Berlin on October 4th. The focus will be on writing which gets away from stereotypes, and the winner will be picked by a jury which includes such doyens in the reportage genre as Philip Gourevitch, famous for his exposure of the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, and Pedro Rosa Mendes, who has told the world of the horrors of life in Angola in the late 1990s.
The prize, instigated by the cultural magazine, Lettre International, and the Aventis Foundation, has an overall fund of €100,000. The Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes is a partner in the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, while an international committee, including novelist Günter Grass and Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski, will advise the project. E-mail: lettre@lettre.de or see www.lettre-ulysses-award.org