IT MAY have started as a sort of sidebar shoot at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, but over 15 years Bantry’s West Cork Literary Festival has blossomed into an impressively healthy tree.
From now until next weekend a packed programme of readings, discussions and workshops will bring a diverse bunch of writers – from Anita Shreve to Dermot Healy, from Noo Saro-Wiwa to Jim Crace – to the higgledy-piggledy town perched on the almost ludicrously beautiful shores of Bantry Bay.
This year the sea won’t be just for decoration – according to the festival’s artistic director, Denyse Woods, it will play a central role.
“We’re celebrating our location on Bantry Bay with a number of events,” she said. “On one afternoon the Navy is bringing in one of its vessels, the LE Orla, and we’re having a reading on that, which people are very excited about.”
It is not for the nautically challenged: punters will have to board the Whiddy Island ferry to get out to the naval ship, where photographer and broadcaster Jasper Winn will talk about his 14-week solo sea-kayak voyage around Ireland.
Ms Woods has tried to ensure that the literary festival offers both the playful and the profound.
During the week visitors can learn how to write a letter with a little help from Longitude author Dava Sobel, or shiver in the darkened Bantry courtroom as Nicci French – the husband-and-wife crime-writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French – conduct an atmospheric late-night reading.
The festival is also working with Amnesty International to remember writers – many of them journalists – around the world whose lives are in danger.
Arguably the most important function of any literary festival, however, is to nurture the next generation of authors, and with courses tackling every conceivable topic from songwriting to comic books to a workshop for teen writers, Bantry takes particular care of its literary business.
At the festival’s official opening last night, the JG Farrell fiction award for the best novel in progress by a writer resident in Munster was presented to Laura McKenna for Forfeit.
The chat afterwards was about the week – indeed, the years – of great literature to come. “During recessions people do need art. And they do go out looking for it,” said Ms Woods. “You couldn’t go looking in a more inspiring place.”
