Loose Leaves: The announcement of the shortlists for the inaugural Irish Book Awards at Dublin's Westbury Hotel were a welcome kickstart to the Irish literary year.
Organised by bookseller Hughes & Hughes, the awards are in three categories: novel, non-fiction and children's books, with an overall prize fund of €22,500 and judges from various walks of life, including representatives from the Sunday Independent, RTÉ and The Irish Times.
Among the big names featured on the shortlists are John Banville, John McGahern, Fintan O'Toole, Kate Thompson and Deirdre Madden (the entire field was assessed by Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersby in Thursday's Irish Times), but not everyone in the book business was happy with this week's announcement.
John McNamee, spokesman for the Irish Booksellers Association (IBA), who is also president of the Brussels-based European Booksellers Federation, said that while he congratulated Hughes & Hughes on delivering its award scheme, for which it had taken the name Irish Book Awards, his reaction was tinged with regret that the IBA, which represents 175 bookshops around the country, wasn't involved.
But awards tend to be good for raising the profile of books and reading, and the interesting thing about all this is that there may yet be even more literary prizes on the Irish scene. McNamee revealed that the IBA has been working with the Irish publishers' association, Clé, to develop an Irish book award scheme which would represent the IBA's entire membership.
"We still hope to deliver this," said McNamee. "We also hope to involve the general public, the readers, in it."
Whether the fact that the awards are being run by Hughes & Hughes, which has 15 shops in Ireland and the UK, will mean that competitor bookshops will not promote either them or the shortlisted books in the run-up to the announcement of the three winning titles in March remains to be seen. Keep an eye out.
All about her mother
How much are novels composed of the raw material of writers' lives? It's an age-old question but Edna O 'Brien (right) isn't being coy about her forthcoming novel, The Light of Evening (Weidenfeld, September) - it's about her mother.
"I was always fascinated by my mother's early history," she says. "Her emigrating to America aged 17, her experiences as a servant in Brooklyn, yet not living the American 'dream' but returning to Ireland and secretly missing the life she had been made to give up through the hands of fate."
O'Brien adds that her mother had a profound effect on her, which shaped her own "precarious history". But there seems to have been no question of writing it as memoir.
"It had to be fiction, which allows for greater scope and excavation of the buried notations of the heart," she says. "Only in fiction can one let rip."
Date with the Whitbread
It was inevitable that The New Policeman, by English-born (but long-time Irish-based) novelist Kate Thompson, would be included on the children's shortlist of the Irish Book Awards (see interview with Thompson on facing page). At this stage Thompson would need a giant Filofax or, better still, a personal assistant to keep track of all the awards this novel is picking up. Still, she will have stiff competition next Tuesday at The Brewery in London when the novel, already winner of the £5,000 (€7,300) Whitbread Children's Book Award, is up for the Whitbread Book of the Year.
Also up for the £25,000 (€36,445) prize are the novel, The Accidental, by Ali Smith, which was the real outsider on last year's Man Booker Prize shortlist; the first novel by Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory; the biography, Matisse: The Master, by Hilary Spurling; and representing poetry, Christopher Logue, with Cold Calls, the fifth and penultimate instalment of his version of The Iliad.
Inspired Duffy
Glasgow-born poet Carol Ann Duffy was this week announced as the winner of the 2005 TS Eliot Prize for her passionate, personal collection of love poems, Rapture. David Constantine, chairman of the judging panel, described the collection as re-animating and continuing a long tradition of poetry of love and loss. Duffy won the £10,000 (€14,580) prize from a field that included Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, David Harsent, Alice Oswald, John Stammers and Gerard Woodward.
Duffy, who is in the unusual position of having seen her collection become a bestselling poetry volume, included in her acceptance speech a tribute to TS Eliot, whose genius had, she said, transformed her as a schoolgirl.