Brian Dillon and Jane Clarke on £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize shortlist

Two Irish writers, the academic Brian Dillon and the poet Jane Clarke, were shortlisted this week for the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize, awarded annually to a book of the highest literary merit that best evokes the spirit of a place.

Judged this year by Kate Adie, Moniza Alvi and Mark Lawson, the prize could also go to Alexandra Harris (Weatherland), Peter Pomerantsev (Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible), James Rebanks (The Shepherd’s Life) and Samanth Subramanian (This Divided Island). The winner of the Royal Society of Literature award, now in its 13th year, will be announced on May 23rd.

Clarke last month won the Hennessy New Irish Writing Emerging Poetry Award for poems first published in The Irish Times. Moniza Alvi wrote of her debut collection for Bloodaxe, The River: “Quiet, lucid, subtle poems, nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background in rural Ireland, and the poet’s enduring attachment to it.”

From Roscommon, Clarke now lives in Co Wicklow and combines writing with her work as a management consultant. She received the Listowel Writer’s Week Poetry Collection Prize in 2014.

Mark Lawson said of Dillon’s The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes (Penguin): “In a strikingly unusual contribution to the literature marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, Dillon uses a 1916 fire at a munitions factory in Kent to explore the history of explosives and buried (sometimes literally so) aspects of British history and topography.”

Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room, a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. A regular reviewer on these pages, he will next week review this year’s Wellcome Trust Book Prize winner, All in the Head, by Suzanne O’Sullivan. He teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

It was also a good week for Eason, which was named Children’s Bookseller of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards, after achieving double-digit growth by launching a seven-week Children’s SpringFest; a Young Adult book convention, DeptCon1; and a YouTube channel for its children’s buyer to recommend books. Eason also runs literary initiatives involving more than 1,000 Irish schools.

Sarah Crossan has been shortlisted for this year’s CLiPPA award for children’s poetry for her YA verse novel One, which is also shortlisted for The Bookseller’s YA Book Prize and the CILIP Carnegie Medal.

The CLiPPA (The Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) is the only prize for children’s poetry in Britain. Also shortlsited are Michael Rosen for A Great Big Cuddle, illustrated by Chris Riddell; Roger McGough for Poetry Pie; John Lyons’ Dancing in the Rain; and Falling Out of the Sky, Poems about Myths and Monsters, edited by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright. The winner, who will receive a £1,000 prize, will be announced in London on July 13th.

Congratulations to two generations of the Mulkerns family. Val Mulkerns published her first novel, A Time Outworn, in 1952. Now 91, she this week launched her latest collection, Memory and Desire, which brings together stories from her three collections, Antiquities, An Idle Woman and A Friend of Don Juan. Her memoir, Friends with the Enemy, is due out next year. Her publisher is 451 Editions, a new independent imprint, founded by her niece Helena Mulkerns, that combines traditional and new publishing to enable writers to republish work that is out of print or select new work, availing of traditional, on-demand and digital methods. It takes its name from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its inspiration from its characters who strive to keep books alive, old or new, whatever the format.

Next Wednesday is European Literature Night; it’s being marked with an event in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, at 6.30pm headlined by David Nicholls, author of One Day, Starter for Ten and Us. Words on the Street – “12 Countries, 12 Voices, 12 Venues – One Great Evening” – offers the chance to sample new European literature read in English by Louise McSharry, Phelim Drew, Ger Ryan, Owen Roe, Sharon Ní Bheoláin, Cormac Battle, Steve Wall, Ruth Scott, Fiachna Ó Braonáin and Pat Kenny, in unusual venues in Temple Bar.