Dún Laoghaire’s Mountains to Sea literary festival has a tough act to follow

Just as twentysomethings raised on a diet of English Premier League soccer regard Sky’s caricature of the beautiful game as the pinnacle of sporting progress, so we literary folk may occasionally magnify the halcyon present of Unesco designations, unlimited festivals and multi-award-winning Irish authors in a way that distorts historical perspective.

For instance, in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, once home to greats such as Joyce, Synge and Beckett, we take pride in the long list of distinguished literary names we’ve brought to the county through Poetry Now, Mountains to Sea and the DLR Voices Series. Lately, however, I discovered that before DLR ever existed Dún Laoghaire hosted the International Writers Conference, which for star wattage would put any contemporary festival to shame.

The three-day event, sponsored by the Arts Council as part of the 1988 Dublin Millennium, was curated by John Banville. According to contemporary reports, Gore Vidal failed to show up, William Kennedy arrived too late to participate, and Samuel Beckett sent his regrets from Paris. Oh, to have such worries.

Despite these disappointments, the line-up included three future Nobel laureates, in Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, plus Chinua Achebe, Les Murray and Susan Sontag. And, foreshadowing current concerns about gender balance, Jennifer Johnston highlighted the underrepresentation of women and younger writers. Plus ca change.

What must it have cost to bring those names to Dublin?

Hats off to Banville and the late Lar Cassidy for pulling off such a coup, but it’s worth noting how difficult it has become to attract international stars to Ireland; even top UK writers too often regard Ireland as an add-on rather than an essential date on book tours.

A festival that rarely struggles to attract headliners is the long-running Oxford Literary Festival, which has lately been attracting headlines for all the wrong reasons. Citing the festival’s “attitude to paying speakers (they don’t)”, Philip Pullman resigned as a patron and quickly received support from other authors, including Joanne Harris and Francesca Simon, who urged a boycott.

With justice, writers pointed out that everyone associated with the logistics of the festival gets paid apart from the content producers – the writers themselves. Oxford’s reaction was barely credible: changing policy would not allow the festival to remain as large and diverse, with 500 speakers a year. But, surely, if the only way you can schedule 500 writers is not to pay them, then you are asking too many writers in the first place; cut your cloth according to your means. This is misguided gigantism.

Irish literary festivals offer a much more manageable experience. And we pay authors. Cúirt, in Galway, and Listowel Writers’ Week have been oases of delight for Irish readers for decades, and Mountains to Sea, of which I am primary curator, will this year present 65 events featuring some 120 authors, all within the quarter square mile of Marine Road, from March 9th to 13th.

We cannot promise Nobel laureates, as in 1988, but major names such as John Irving, Michael Parkinson, Tom Holland, Sophie Hannah and Nell Zink will be there alongside the cream of home talent, including Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Kevin Barry, Neil Jordan, Donal Ryan and Nuala O’Connor. The families and schools programme features Patrick Ness, Cathy Cassidy, Louise O’Neill, Holly Webb and Philip Ardagh.

The Irish festival season is gearing up. Lend us your ears.

Bert Wright is curator of the DLR Voices Series and the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival