New Irish festival for Switzerland; Yoto Carnegie Medal winners; Encore Award for Daisy Hildyard

In The Irish Times this Saturday, Anna Carey selects the 25 best summer reads. Mark O’Connell talks to Keith Duggan about A Thread of Violence, his book about Malcolm Macarthur. Derek Scally interviews Irish historian Mark Jones, whose new history of a seismic year in German history, 1923, is ruffling feathers in Berlin. Hugh Linehan asks whether Oscar Wilde would have survived #MeToo. And there is a Q&A with Siobhan MacGowan about her new novel, The Graces.

Reviews are Karlin Lillington on The Power of One: Blowing the Whistle on Facebook by Frances Haugen; Seamus Martin on Mikhail Shiskin’s My Russia: War or Peace?; Ruth McKee on She That Lay Silent-Like Upon the Shore by Brendan Casey; Jessica Traynor on the best new poetry; Adam Coleman on The State by Philip Pettit; Ian Hughes on Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being In Person by Andy Field; Helen Cullen on Brandon Taylor The Late Americans; Charleen Hurtubise on Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai; Donald Clarke on Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page; Michael Cronin on Scattered Love by Maylis Besserie, translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin; Anna Carey on The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on A Good House for Children by Kate Collins; Paul Clements on local history books; and Sarah Gilmartin on I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore.

This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is The IT Girl by Ruth Ware. You can buy this popular thriller with your newspaper for just €4.99, a €6 saving.

The bilingual city of Fribourg in western Switzerland is the setting for a new festival of Irish culture taking place from October 6th to 8th. The literary programme is at the heart of the Irish Festival Fribourg/Freiburg, which will also feature Irish films, music, public lectures, dance and photography.

Guest authors include John Boyne, Anne Griffin, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Nuala O’Connor and Padraig Rooney. The lectures will be delivered by Shane Walshe and Anne-Claire Michoux of the University of Zurich.

The festival is the creation of author Clare O’Dea, long-time resident of Switzerland. “We’ve had a wonderful response from everyone so far, from the participating artists to the Irish community to the local venues and city authorities.”

Switzerland is home to some 8,000 Irish people. Irish music events are already popular among the Swiss but this festival is billed as an opportunity to discover more aspects of the contemporary culture.

Five films are featured in the programme, including Redemption of a Rogue, A Date for Mad Mary and An Cailín Ciúin. Michael McCormack’s Breaking Out, the 2021 documentary about the life of Fergus O’Farrell, will have its Swiss premiere, alongside Young Plato, set in a school in Belfast’s Ardoyne district and directed by Neasa Ní Chianáin and Declan McGrath.

The Irish Festival Fribourg/Freiburg has the support of the city and canton of Fribourg, the Irish Embassy Bern, Tourism Ireland, the Irish Film Institute International, the Swiss Centre of Irish Studies and the Max-Geilinger Foundation. View the full programme.

Joseph O’Connor will be bringing it all back home on July 13th when he will be reading from his bestselling historical novel, My Father’s House, the story of Kerry priest Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, and discussing it with broadcaster, musician, producer, and founder of the internationally acclaimed Other Voices series, Philip King, in O’Flaherty’s home town of Killarney.

Inspired by an extraordinary true story, My Father’s House details how the priest and his small band of activists saved thousands from the Nazis in Rome during the second World War. Copies of My Father’s House will be on sale, and Joseph O’Connor will be happy to sign. The show also features live performances from soprano Sharon Lyons and countertenor Nils Wanderer.

The event takes place at 7pm in the Gleneagle INEC Arena and tickets are €13.

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For the first time in the awards’ almost 90-year history, the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing has been awarded to a book in translation – The Blue Book of Nebo (Firefly Press), written and translated by Manon Steffan Ros. Told through the dual narrative of a mother and son in post-apocalyptic Nebo, this “compelling, conceivable” story explores Welsh identity and culture, and offers a beautiful appreciation of language. The original Welsh publication, Llyfr Glas Nebo, won multiple awards, including the 2019 Wales Book of the Year.

Jeet Zdung won the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear, (Kingfisher, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Books). This is the second consecutive year that a graphic novel has clinched the prize. Written and inspired by the real life of Vietnamese wildlife conservationist Dr Trang Nguyen, the “beautiful” manga-inspired illustrations – including scenic watercolours and detailed, pencil sketched journal entries – work together to offer “something new to discover on each re-reading” and inspire and educate young wildlife activists.

The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding achievement in children’s writing and illustration and are unique in being judged by an expert panel of children’s and youth librarians, including 12 librarians from CILIP, the library and information association’s Youth Libraries Group.

Each year thousands of reading groups in schools and libraries in the UK and around the world get involved in the Awards, with children and young people ‘shadowing’ the judging process, debating and choosing their own winners. They have voted for their favourites from this year’s shortlist and have chosen I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys for the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice Medal for Writing, and The Comet by Joe Todd-Stanton for the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice Medal for Illustration.

Daisy Hildyard has won the 2023 Encore Award for Emergency (Fitzcarraldo Editions). A sustained mediation on the potential of our human interconnections with all that surrounds us, Emergency is as much a lyrical celebration of life as it is a disquietude and call to action. An enthralling experience of being truly in the world. The annual Encore Award of £10,000 celebrates outstanding achievements in second novels.

‘An award for a second attempt is a kind-hearted award,” Hildyard said, “and I am happy and grateful to have been a part of it this year. The other authors on the shortlist are all writers whose work I respect, and I like that the award makes us into a cohort: we’ve written our different books about different things, but we’re together on our second novels at the same moment (even though I reckon I’m the oldest, which means they’re actually one step ahead of me). When we are very, very old, on our 75th novels, I hope we’ll still be seeing and reading each other.

I’m grateful to my agent David Godwin and to my publishers Fitzcarraldo, who made this book – I just wrote a Word doc – and they’ve cared for it so thoughtfully and generously, before and since its release. The prize money will give me time at my desk, it makes a big and real difference. Speaking personally, it meant a lot to me that the judges described Emergency as a celebration of life, an experience of being in the thick of life – thank you for reading the novel and thinking about it like this. And it’s good to think of people feeling that, inside or outside the book.”

This year’s judges, Maura Dooley, Daljit Nagra and Nikesh Shukla said: “Emergency is a work of great style and substance; contemplative, clever and seductive. Lyrically unfolding its story slowly and delicately through the compelling voice of a narrator brought to a standstill in lockdown, this work reflects on rural life at a point of great change. In contemplating childhood, in her evocation of her schooldays, in the natural world seen through the eyes of a child, Hildyard summons a world just pre-internet, a place in which the edgelands of a rural community struggle as employment slips away.

“In her finely-observed and precise descriptions of the environment Hildyard elides the easy distinctions between the man-made and the natural world, asking the reader to look harder. The reader is invited to consider what the destruction of this interrelated world might mean for us all. This is a powerful pastoral novel written with a watchful, unsparing eye, both praising and exposing the beauty, the ugliness, and the essential interconnectedness of life.”