A round-up of this week's literary news
The making of Munro
How was the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro selected as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009? All will be revealed at a public event in Trinity College Dublin at 12.30pm on Thursday, June 25th, just hours before the award is made at a gala dinner that night in the college. At the event the three judges – Jane Smiley, Amit Chaudhuri and Andrey Kurkov – will discuss their choice under the chairmanship of Colm Tóibín, who was a judge of the 2007 award.
“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short-story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels,” say the judges, who will elaborate more in Trinity on how they picked her from a list that included Peter Carey, James Kelman and Joyce Carol Oates.
Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, has a writing career stretching back 40 years, since the publication of Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Storiesin 1968 .
The panel discussion is free. Tickets can be booked at www.tcd.ie/library/booker
Poets back Walcott
Seamus Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue, Al Alvarez and Jon Stallworthy are among the poets who nominated Derek Walcott (above) as Oxford professor of poetry who have written to him to express their “dismay and disgust at the cowardly smear campaign” against his candidacy. The Nobel prize-winning Walcott withdrew from the race following an anonymous letter campaign in which Oxford academics were sent photocopied pages from a book detailing a sexual harassment claim against him by a Harvard student in 1982. The 19 signatories of the letter to Walcott said they had little doubt that their colleague Ursula Fanthorpe would have been as anxious to sign their letter as she was to sign his nomination form had she not died on April 28th.
In their letter, published in full in the Times Literary Supplement(issue 5540), the poets said they considered the campaign against Walcott to have dishonoured their calling. "We affirm our undiminished admiration for all that you have done – and continue to do – for poetry and drama."
The great late Yeats
Bob Geldof, Edna O’Brien and The Waterboys are among the line-up for a celebration of WB Yeats at the National Library on Dublin’s Kildare Street this month. Summer’s Wreath 09, a four-week programme of free public events, will mark the 70th anniversary of Yeats’s death. The work of his final period will be particularly highlighted. Yeats was born on this day – June 13th – in 1865.
Yeats’s biographer, Roy Foster, and actor Fiona Shaw will present an event on Wednesday at 7.30pm focusing on Yeats’s intense creativity in his later life, while Bob Geldof will talk about his love of Yeats and read a personal selection of the poet’s work on Friday at 7.30pm. Neil Jordan will participate in a lunchtime event on June 23rd – with Edna O’Brien presenting readings of Yeats’s poems and reflections on his work in conversation with Vincent Woods later that day, at 8pm.
The programme will culminate on Tuesday, June 30th, at 7.30pm with a special performance by Mike Scott and Steve Wickham of The Waterboys, who have set the poetry of Yeats to music many times in the past
Jennifer Johnston, Marina Carr, Robert Ballagh and Nick Miller are also taking part. Some events must be booked in advance. 01-6030277, nli.ie.
Pomp over Pompeii
Mary Beard has won one of the £20,000 Wolfson History prizes for her book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. The prizes are awarded annually to promote excellence in the writing of history for the general public. "What was especially fun for me," said Beard, "was the idea that no classical book had won this since 1974."