Australia has a long association with penal servitude, but Angus Strachan won the Sydney-based Suspended Sentence Award without committing any crime.
He is an Australian writer whose attendance at the Joyce Summer School in Dublin this week is part of this literary award given by the James Joyce Foundation in Sydney to new writers to allow them to travel to Joyce's cities, Dublin, Paris, Zurich and Trieste, to promote their work.
The award is named after Joyce's stylistic device of not ending sentences with full stops, but of leaving them "suspended". Mr Strachan, a playwright, won it for a monologue from a new play.
"It's very inspiring to study James Joyce so intensely, a writer who broke the rules so consistently," he said. He has also used his visit to talk to the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Abbey and Andrew's Lane theatres. Mr Strachan is one of the 40 students from about 15 countries who have come to the 11th annual James Joyce Summer School, which is run by UCD at Newman House, the building where the novelist was a student.
Joyce is one of the most studied writers in the world; this week two of his novels were placed first and third of the best novels in the English language. The summer school introduces students both to some of the latest research and analysis of his work and to more immediate experience of his environment and his life through the Joyce Centre in North Great George's Street, Dublin, run by his nephew Mr Ken Monaghan.
Earlier this week they heard of another side of Joyce, one who, according to Mr Monaghan, inherited an abusive attitude to women from his father and whose notoriety caused great suffering to his sisters. "It brought the family history back into the study of Joyce," the school's director, Dr Anne Fogarty, said. Mr Peter Costello, author of a number of books on Joyce and Irish social history, told students that for all his failings, his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, "remained the central figure in James Joyce's imagination". Mr Costello said there was a continuity in lifestyle between that of James Joyce, living the life of a gentleman in Paris on other people's money, and that of his father and his grandfather, also called James Joyce.
When James Joyce died his only son adopted the aspirations of his father, especially the desire to be seen as a gentleman. Like many Corkonians with capital, he moved to the then booming Dublin, where he became secretary of a distillery in Chapelizod.
Mr Costello said that recollections of him permeate his son's writings.
Prof Michael Groden described his project for a hypertext Ulysses. By clicking a word, a reader will be able to get the correct pronunciation of that word in Dublin English and by clicking a passage he or she will get a number of readings of that passage.
Dr Andrew Gibson from Royal Holloway and Bedford College, London, said there was now a greater recognition of the importance for Joyce of Irish history and politics. The key concern in the first three chapters of Ulysses was the nightmare of Irish history.
Dr Fogarty's lecture opening the school also concerned the treatment of politics in Ulysses. "A critique of nationalism in fact uneasily but readily co-exists in Joyce's writings alongside a sympathy with its more revolutionary objectives," she said.