LooseLeaves:Six Irish short story writers , including Claire Keegan, for her forthcoming collection, Walk the Blue Fields (Faber), and John F Deane, for his recently published The Heather Fields and Other Stories (Blackstaff), are among 34 writers whose collections make up the longlist for this year's €35,000 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
They'll be up against such big guns as Canadian Alice Munro, for the autobiographical collection, The View from Castle Rock, and Every Move You Make, by the Australian writer, David Malouf (both Chatto), on a longlist dominated by Americans.
The other collections by Irish writers are Kevin Barry's There Are Little Kingdoms (The Stinging Fly Press), Elizabeth MacDonald's A House of Cards (Pillar Press), Micheál Ó Conghaile's The Colours of Man and Other Stories and Geraldine Mills's The Weight of Feathers (both Arlen House).
Interestingly, the competition organiser, the Munster Literature Centre, has announced that two titles on the longlist will not be considered in their entirety. The title story of The Heather Fields is deemed too long at 180 pages, though the rest of the book will be in contention. And while the American, Mary Gordon, is on board with The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon), only the new and uncollected part of the book will be considered and not stories published in an earlier collection. Other authors on the list include EA Markham, Tessa Hadley and Olaf Olafsson.
The shortlist for the prize, which is sponsored by Cork City Council in association with The Irish Times, will be announced in mid-July. The winner will be announced at the close of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival in September . This year's judges are Rick Moody, Segun Afolabi and Nuala Ní Chonchúir, all of them practitioners of the short story.
www.munsterlit.ie
Proulx joins Higgins's party
Author of Brokeback Mountain (and much more besides), Annie Proulx will be in Celbridge, Co Kildare, next weekend (May 5th and 6th) to launch New Island's new edition of that great modern Irish classic, Langrishe, Go Down, by Aidan Higgins (paperback reviewed on Weekend 13), as part of the latter's 80th birthday celebrations.
Higgins will open proceedings by reading with writer Shane Connaughton and actress Ingrid Craigie. Novelist Dermot Healy will give a writing masterclass and John Banville and Fintan O'Toole will talk about Langrishe and Higgins's autobiography, Donkey's Years. There is also a symposium on the writer's work, with Proulx, Gerry Dukes and poet Derek Mahon. Events will wind up with the announcement of the winner of the In the Footsteps of Aidan Higgins competition, for which the shortlisted writers, chosen from more than 100 entries, are James Anderson, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, William Wall, Victoria Neumark and Barty Begley. Higgins will also offer reflections on his return to Celbridge, where he was born in Springfield House in 1927.
www.aidanhiggins.ie; www.kildare.ie
Irish studies, American prizes
Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c1530-1750, by William J Smyth, of UCC (Cork University Press/University of Notre Dame Press), and Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History, by Cormac O'Grada, of UCD (Princeton University Press), were the joint winners of the James
S Donnelly Snr Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences, presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies in New York last week. The judges said the Smyth book was a monumental work by a geographer, weaving the story of the development of Ireland as a colony in early modernity. The O'Grada book, meanwhile, was described as an impressive account of the historical position of Jews in Irish society at the beginning of the 20th century.
Among other prizes presented at the conference, one, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972 (Oxford University Press), by Heather Clark, picked up two awards, the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature and the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book. The citation for the latter said the book was a "must-read for the study of contemporary Irish poetry".
Literary residents in Paris
Paul Durcan is among those who will be writers-in-residence at the Irish College in Paris later this year and next. The others are Barry McCrea, author of the novel, The First Verse, who will spend his time in Paris working on his second novel, set between Dublin and Paris; Christine Madden, who will work on a novel and explore the Parisian dance and theatre world; and poet Michael Coady.
www.centreculturelirlandais.com