The waiting's almost over from the gales at the gala: The countdown has started to the odyssey that will be the Beckett Centenary Festival next month.
Throughout April, the life and plays of Samuel Beckett will be celebrated in events at more than 20 venues in Dublin. The festival's programme was launched in Dublin at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland on Tuesday. As part of the celebration, nine of Beckett's 19 plays will be performed at the Gate Theatre and London's Barbican.
John Hurt, who will reprise the eponymous role in Krapp's Last Tape in the festival, said the play "is kind of autobiographical, it's Beckett saying there but for the grace of God go I . . . it's about a man who denies love for artistic reasons".
Play, under the direction of Michael Barker-Caven, looks at infidelity, said actor Nick Dunning, who will be acting in it alongside Ingrid Craigie.
"It's a love triangle between a husband, his wife and his mistress, but they are all dead," he said.
Johnny Murphy, who has played Estragon in Waiting for Godot on stages around the world, will again join Barry McGovern, Stephen Brennan and Alan Stanford on stage at the Gate.
"I love playing him because he's selfish, a moan, and he finds faults and he won't agree with Vladimir," said Murphy.
Footfalls, to be directed by Alan Gilsenan, is "a very strange, beautiful and enigmatic piece that I have great affection for", said actor Susan Fitzgerald, who played the lead role in the Gate's production in 1991. "It's about a woman who walks backwards and forwards. She may or may not be alive."
"For me, the essence of Beckett is perhaps his capacity to conceal a profound complexity of thought in stark visual and aural imagery," said John O'Donoghue, Minister for Arts, at the programme's launch.
Jimmy Fay, of Bedrock Productions, said his company will be presenting four of Beckett's later plays at Project arts centre, while painter Cian McLoughlin's show, comprising portraits of actors in character, will go on show at the Office of Public Works on St Stephen's Green from Tuesday, April 4th.
Also at the launch were actor Siân Phillips, whose festival appearance in Rockaby will be her first Beckett play. Beckett's nephew, Edward Beckett, who knew his uncle well in Paris in the 1960s when he was studying the flute, said he was "a lovely man, a very kind and understanding man".
Writers take refuge
The biting cold did not deter writers from attending the gala awards ceremony of the inaugural Irish Book Awards, with categories in fiction, non-fiction and children's books, at the Royal Irish Yacht Club in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on Wednesday.
According to writer Mike McCormack, whose third book, Notes from a Coma, was nominated in the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year category: "books have a shelf-life somewhere between bread and yogurt . . . My book did very well critically but it has to rely on word of mouth. This [ nomination] gives it wings again and lights a fire under its arse".
Fellow nominee William Wall, whose book, This is the Country, was on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize last year, came from his native Cork, along with his wife, Liz Kirwan, for the awards ceremony.
Poet and writer Nick Laird who was shortlisted in the Irish Book Awards for his debut novel, Utterly Monkey, was there too.
Brian Lynch's novel, The Winner of Sorrow, also came into the running for this €10,000 award. Set in the 18th century, the book's story, explained Lynch, is about "a great poet, but he was a great lover of women and he had problems in that area - and he was also extremely mad".
The Sea, by John Banville, which won out against the five other nominees to win Irish Novel of the Year, "was a complete reading experience", said one of the judges, Derek Hand, a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. "It's a quiet novel, low key, but with passion," he added.
The Argosy Irish Non-Fiction award, worth €7,500, went to Brian Dillon for his memoir, In the Dark Room, beating off competition from former secretary-general of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Donal Nevin, broadcaster David McWilliams and writer John McGahern.
Meanwhile, the first Dublin Airport Authority Irish Children's Book of the Year prize, worth €5,000, was awarded to Kate Thompson for her latest work, The New Policeman. Other nominated children's writers included Siobhán Parkinson and former broadcaster John Quinn.
Poems to the people
Cork-born poet Greg Delanty was applauded by fellow poets this week in Dublin on publication of his collected poems from the past 20 years.
"The central preoccupation of this book is different kinds of emigration, immigration, exile and nationality," said Christopher Ricks, professor of poetry at Oxford University and a teacher at Boston University. "These are poems which wish people well. Greg Delanty as a poet not only asks to be trusted - and should be almost all the time - but he also gives trust. He trusts his readers to take the point. There aren't nudges in these poems, there aren't sniggers or snickers. There's a great deal of wit and comedy . . . The poems are not doctrinaire even when they are political poems of great passion and commitment."
Michael Schmidt, founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press, which has published the collection, said Delanty's strength is "that he writes very accessible, short but very eloquent poems". His favourite poem in the collection is Aceldama, which is "the field where the unborn are buried. It's about his family. It's very, very moving".
Among those there to congratulate the Vermont-based Delanty were Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and his wife, writer Marie Heaney; Prof Terence Brown, of TCD; writer Liam Ó Muirthile; Dr Michelle O'Riordan, of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Antony Farrell, of Lilliput Press; poets Enda Wyley and Peter Sirr; and Geraldine Cooke, literary agent to Liam Browne, whose The Emigrant's Farewell is reviewed on page 10. Also there were writers Anthony Cronin and Philip Casey, and poet Bernadette O'Reilly, with her friend, Eleanor Dunne.
Collected Poems 1986-2006, by Greg Delanty, is published by Carcanet Press
Opening the door to books
Readers, writers and Minister for Education Mary Hanafin gathered in Eason's bookshop on O'Connell Street, Dublin, on Tuesday, to talk about books, and in particular the latest books in the Open Door series for adult learners.
Maureen Gilmartin, who attends the Dublin Adult Learning Centre in Dublin's Mountjoy Square, listed Gareth O'Callaghan's story, Joe's Wedding, and Peter Sheridan's Old Money, New Money among her favourites from earlier series.
For another reader an unexpected twist in The Story of Joe Brown, by Rose Doyle, made this the best read to date in the series for Liam O'Neill, from Coolock.
Writers new to the series this time around include John Connolly, Nick Hornby and Cecelia Ahern. The work of Roddy Doyle and Sarah Webb, who both attended the event, features again in this series, along with a book by Patricia Scanlan, who initiated the series with publisher Edwin Higel, of New Island.
Other writers who have contributed to the Open Door series in the past came too, including Sheila O'Flanagan, Deirdre Purcell and Dermot Bolger (who was also representing publisher New Island).
"I can see the challenges that are there for all sorts of people with literacy problems," said Hanafin, speaking at the Eason's reception.
These books are "opening a door to choice and to relevance", she added. There are 34,000 people who avail of literary classes in Ireland, she continued, and "that shows their confidence and pays credit to all those who teach them".
Others at the launch included Portlaoise bookseller John McNamee, who is president of the European Booksellers Federation; Michael Ryder, chairman of Eason & Son, and transition-year students Imogen O'Rourke and Hannah Connell-Moylan, of Alexandra College, Dublin.