Open houseThe Big House has always been a fascinating topic in Irish history and letters and now the Royal Irish Academy is running a conference on it in the autumn.
The Big House in Twentieth Century Irish Writing opens in the academy's Dawson Street home on October 14th with a keynote address from Vera Kreilkamp entitled Still Standing: the Big House Novel and the Critics. The conference continues the following day with the work of Yeats, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen and Somerville and Ross - among others - under discussion and a paper from Sean Kennedy on the ends of ascendancy in Beckett's Watt notebooks. Contemporary drama will be addressed by Alison O'Malley-Younger who will look at Brian Friel's Aristocrats. That play will also be scrutinised in Mary O'Donoghue's contribution, Born and Reared in the Gate Lodge: Men on the Outskirts of the Big House in Brian Friel's Foundry House and Aristocrats, while Mary Burke will speak on Tom Murphy: Reconstructing the Big House in Celtic Tiger Ireland. There'll also be a session on contemporary fiction with a paper from Rachael Sealy Lynch called The 'Great Bright Red American Fridge': Big Housekeeping in Jennifer Johnston's Two Moons, while Anne Markey will speak on the Big House in contemporary popular fiction and Olwen Purdue on the Big House in Northern Ireland politics and society from 1921 to 1960. The conference is open to the public. www.ria.ie
Writer remembered
Patrick Burkley, a young writer from Tralee, Co Kerry, who died in a car accident in Dublin in 1982 aged 30 is remembered by fellow Tralee man, Michael Dwyer of The Irish Times in the current issue of The Old Kerry Journal (June 2008, Vol 2, €12.95). Burkley, who wrote poetry and short stories and whose work appeared in the literary sections of the Irish Press and The Irish Times, got to know Dwyer when the latter was working in the early 1970s for Kerry County Library, to which Burkley was a regular visitor. They were both in the Tralee Film Society and acted in the Group Theatre company together. Dwyer evokes the liveliness of the arts scene of that era in Tralee, praising Burkley's nature-inspired "beautifully structured and heartfelt" poetry.
Earth calling
Jhumpa Lahiri (below), the winner of this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, will read from Unaccustomed Earth, her winning collection, during the Ninth Annual Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork in September, as well as taking part in a public interview with this paper's literary correspondent, Eileen Battersby.
The five-day festival will also see a former winner (in 2005) of the prize, Bejing-born Yiyun Li (see W6), making her first appearance in Cork for a reading and interview. Other writers taking part are Mary Leland, Wena Poon, Clare Wigfall, Mary O'Donnell, William Wall and Bernard MacLaverty . There are also workshops, including an introduction to short story writing with Jon Boilard, former fiction editor of Southword; the announcement of the €1,500 Sean O'Faolain Short Story Prize and a panel discussion on the short story chaired by Rosalind Porter, senior editor at Granta with Stinging Fly editor Declan Meade; Jen Hamilton-Emery, commissioning editor with the publishing house Salt; Lucy Luck, literary agent, and RTÉ's Seamus Hosey, organiser of the annual Francis MacManus awards. www.munsterlit.ie
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