On The Town:Poet and teacher Nell Regan smiled as she recounted the innocent questions of her young students at Castaheany Educate Together National School in Dublin 15 beforeshe left to attend the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards in Dublin this week.
On hearing she had been shortlisted in the poetry category for her first published collection, Preparing for Spring, they wanted to know whether they could vote for her.
But poet and embroiderer Annie Freud from London was the winner of the €5,000 poetry prize for her collection, The Best Man that Ever Was, in which she writes about Adolf Hitler. "It was a very frightening experience, because I'm a Jew, but the fear was very necessary to the creative process. It was inspired by The Story of O," she explained just before the prize-giving ceremony began at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.
Freud "possesses an impressive command of tone," said poet Michael Longley, one of the 10 judges. "She has the power to defamiliarise the everyday. Her poetry can be personal, dark, intimate, a bit world-weary, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking."
The fiction €5,000 prize went to Hisham Matar for his first book, In the Country of Men. It is narrated "in a voice that rings true from the first to the last word, it is both hopeful and deeply disturbing," said one of the judges, the writer James Ryan, whose own fourth novel, South of the Border, is due out early next year, when he presented the prize.
The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Séamus Brennan, said at the gala event that "writing and literature criss-cross nations" and play "an important role in countering prejudices".
John Stubbs was the overall winner of the €20,000 prize, and winner of the €5,000 non-fiction/biography category for Donne: The Reformed Soul. The other winners were Mícheál de Barra, whose An Bóthar go Santiago won the €5,000 Irish-language book category, while Sarah Mussi won the €5,000 children's book category with her first publication, The Door of No Return.
Opening night and a farewell
It was a night of mixed feelings for Marie Rooney, deputy director of the Gate Theatre, at the opening of Hugh Leonard's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations this week. She stood at the top of the stairs welcoming guests to an opening night for the last time.
After almost 30 years working at the theatre she is moving on to become an independent producer, project manager and PR and marketing strategist. "But I was very young when I started," she laughed. "I'm sad because it's been I don't know how many openings. I'm also excited about change."
Among those at the opening night was actor David Shannon, who played the title role in the recent production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and actor Brendan Gleeson with his wife, Mary, who were there to see their son, Domhnaill, in the part of the Herbert Pocket.
"I love the fact that there's a romantic outcome [in Great Expectations]," said former teacher Marianne Ryan-Moroney from Roscrea, Co Tipperary. "And I empathise completely with Miss Havisham because she so obviously was in love with somebody."
Playwright Bernard Farrell and his wife, Gloria, both agreed. "It's full of hope . . . it's the spirit of Christmas," said Farrell.
Pat and Maureen Grant from Newry, Co Down, who are both involved in the Newry Drama Festival, which celebrates it's 56th year next March, were "hoping to say hello to Jack", aka Leonard, the playwright who arrived with his daughter, Danielle Byrne.
"I read it [Great Expectations] as a child in Danish," recalled gallery owner Ib Jorgensen. "Dickens and Hans Christien Andersen were great friends and great competitors."
Eugene Downes, chief executive of Culture Ireland, said he remembered he was five when his aunt, Beatrice Ryan, read the book to him.
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in an adaptation by Hugh Leonard, is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Feb 2
Stars come out for the Gaeity
Stars were in the eyes of the many who gathered to celebrate the beauty and history of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin this week. Actors Frank Kelly, Des Keogh and Stephen Rae, impressario Louis Walsh, Lord Henry Mount Charles, singer Bernadette Greevy, artists Bernadette Madden and Fergus Martin, Gay Byrne and his wife Kathleen Watkins, the Dubliner publisher Trevor White, theatre photographer Tom Lawlor and former film censor Sheamus Smith were among those who crowded into the theatre's upstairs bar to salute publication of a book by author Robert O'Byrne on the history of the 137-year-old theatre.
The Gaiety could hold 2,000 people when it opened in 1871 said O'Byrne, but he pointed out "we've grown bigger". Today the theatre holds fewer than 1,200. "People want more leg room now," he explained.
Actor and comedian Niall Toibín said he was only a teenager when he first stepped the boards of the Gaiety. He loves the building, he said. "There's an intimacy about it despite the size of the auditorium. I have worked in the Gaiety probably more than I've worked any where else." Among the many productions he's done, he listed six revivals of Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy and six one-man shows.
"There's something magical about the Gaiety . . . because of all the stars that were here," said Billie Barry, founder of the famous children's stage school in 1967. Bought by Denis and Caroline Desmond eight years ago, the Gaiety "was a business decision that turned into a labour of love," she said. The pair spent €2.2 million along with €7.8 million from the Government on its refurbishment. The book, which has more than 1,000 illustrations, was described as "the definitive history" by the theatre's managing director John Costigan.
Dublin's Gaiety Theatre: The Grand Old Lady of South King Street by Robert O'Bryne is published by the theatre's owners
Memories of Ferns evoked in Fouquet's
Lara Marlowe
More than 100 people attended writer Colm Tóibín's annual Ireland Fund of France lecture at the Irish College in Paris on Tuesday. They were, Tóibín noted gratefully, a particularly attentive, engaged audience.
Tóibín recounted his school days at Ferns College in Co Wexford, and how it came as a shock to him to learn that the priest who had befriended him and another boy had earlier been disciplined for paedophilia. He described the veil of silence over the scandal, the way all the priests in the college knew but no one said anything.
The issue was not black and white, Tóibín said, but he made clear the distinction between homosexuality and paedophilia. He then read a short story from his latest book, Mothers and Sons, about an elderly Irish woman who learns that her son, a priest, is to stand trial for paedophilia.
"I was frightened to death when [ the director of the Irish College], Sheila [ Pratschke] told me [ the subject]," Pierre Joannon, the president of the Ireland Fund of France, told Tóibín after the talk. "But you put it so well, with such delicacy."
Joannon organised a dinner at Fouquet's on the Champs-Élysées, James Joyce's favourite Parisian restaurant, which was attended by 10 people, including Ireland's Ambassador Anne Anderson and Barry McCrea, a writer-in-residence at the Irish College. Also present was Maggie Doyle, director of foreign acquisitions at the French publisher Robert Laffont (which will publish Mothers and Sons in French next March).
Tóibín combined the Paris trip with journeys to Majorca and Geneva for a piece he is writing on the Catalan painter Miquel Barceló for an upcoming exhibition at Imma. In January, Tóibín will begin a 10-week stay at Stanford University, in California, where he will teach a course entitled "Dublin", to include James Joyce, Seán O'Casey and Yeats's Dublin poems.