Sadbh: With the Bloomsday centenary on June 16th looming nearer, there could be few better ways to get into the mood for the big bonanza than by perusing the James Joyce Bloomsday Magazine 2004 just published by the James Joyce Centre.
Among its most engaging features are the comments from international writers and artists on the experience of reading Joyce and the impact his books have had on their lives and work. Paul Muldoon recounts how he first tried to read Ulysses as a student in the early 1970s at Queen's University. Though he didn't come back to it for several years, he cheerfully says he reads it every couple of years. C.K. Stead recounts how at the age of 19 it pleased him "in a Joycean, ego-centred way", that the last sentence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ended with his name: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead". Matthew Pearl says that if he ever wrote a short story he'd want it to be something that could be in Dubliners, adding that "maybe that's why I haven't written any". John Banville recounts the epiphanic moment in Liverpool on a snowy December day in the early 1960s when aged 17 he bought his first copy of Ulysses. This coincided with a girl with whom he had been conducting a love affair breaking with him. "I was devastated - does one ever recover fully from the end of one's first affair? - but luckily I had comforters in Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and the rest of the cast. The result is that I can never read the opening sections of the book without experiencing the vestigial taste of salt tears." Edited by Declan Meade, the magazine also includes a preview by curator Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes of this summer's Joyce in Art : Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce exhibition at the RHA, which opens on June 10th. The 66- page journal costs €5.
Prize givings
Two new literary prizes were inaugurated this week. The first, The Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, will be awarded every year for the next five years, the winner chosen each year by the holder of the Ireland Chair of Poetry. The inaugural award was presented this week to Alice Lyons by the current chair of poetry, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Lyons, who was born in the US now lives in Co Roscommon. She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award with her first collection speck. The prize is a four-week residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig.
The second prize , the Annie Deeny Memorial Prize, a perpetual award, is in memory of Deeny, a teacher and mother of six children, who wrote but never sought to have her work published. The prize will be awarded to a woman "preferably a mother" to help her pursue her writing. The prize is a two-week residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre with €250 to cover expenses. Applications are now invited. More information at www.tyroneguthrie.ie
Gremlins win out
Nielsen BookScan, which supplies bestseller lists to the media, was hit by such a systems failure this week that it was unable to deliver book sales figures for the week ending Saturday, May 15th in time for today's papers. The processing system problems followed Bookscan's move to new headquarters in Surrey.
However, it did provide some historical data which turned up among other things the fact that Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea is the best-selling adult paperback novel of the year so far in Britain. In an overall category, when paperback sales of both the children's and adult editions of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time were combined, Mark Haddon's award-winning novel hit the top slot.
Big news this week too for Cecelia Ahern, whose PS, I Love You was picked as one of the six great easy summer reads by Channel 4's Richard and Judy show. Publishers HarperCollins have now brought forward publication of the mass market edition of the novel from September to early June as massive demand for it is guaranteed as viewers get ready to vote for their favourite among the six when the promotion kicks off on June 9th.
Writers for Amnesty
The 10th Amnesty International Literary Benefit takes place at Queen's University, Belfast, this Thursday at 7.45 p.m. in the Staff Senior Common Room in College Gardens. Tickets £6/4.50. Writers taking part include Michael Longley, Anne Enright and Leontia Flynn.