Irish Writers for Palestine event switches to Vicar St; An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 shortlist

In The Irish Times tomorrow, Jan Carson writes about the rewards of another year of focused reading. This year she has been reading the complete works of Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut. There is a Q&A with PJ Gallagher, author of the memoir Madhouse. John Carter Cash talks to Joe Breen about his father’s legacy and his new book, Johnny Cash: The Life in Lyrics. Gavin Esler, author of Britain Is Better than This, talks to Mark Hennessy about Brexit and the North.

The photographs of Henry Wills documenting Mayo and Irish life were published in the Western People for more than 40 years. As a book collecting his best images, In All Kinds Of Weather, is launched, he talks to Keith Duggan. Prof Niamh Reilly of the University of Galway introduces The Material for Victory: The Memoirs of Andrew J Kettle, her great-great-grandfather.

Reviews are Gemma Tipton on The Illuminated Window by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Michael Healy, 1873-1941: An Túr Gloine’s stained glass pioneer; Ted Smyth on The Last Politiican by Franklin Foer and Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein; Declan Burke on the best new crime fiction; Lucie Shelly on Death Valley by Melissa Broder; Aimée Walsh on The Glutton by AK Blakemore; Ray Burke on Face Down by David Blake Knox; Anna Carey on Disobedient Bodies by Emma Dabiri; Edel Coffey on Playing Games by Huma Qureshi; Niamh Jiménez on The Politics of Time by Guy Standing; Fergus Mulligan on Dear Gay: Letters to The Gay Byrne Show. a handwritten history of Ireland by Suzy Byrne; Eoin Ó Broin on Herbert Simms by Lindie Naughton; and Sarah Gilmartin on Fanatic Heart by Thomas Keneally.

This Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer is The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah, just €5.99 with your paper, a €5 saving.

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Two weeks ago, Irish Writers for Palestine announced four events in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Galway which sold out within minutes. The massive support shown by the Irish public through these sales has prompted the organisers to move the Dublin event to a larger venue. It will now take place in Vicar Street on Tuesday, December 5th, with Irish writers and guests including Sally Rooney, Blindboy, Kevin Barry and Sinéad Gleeson.

Actor and writer Tara Flynn will host the Dublin event in the new venue of Vicar Street with participants including Blindboy Boatclub, Colin Barrett, Kevin Barry, Sinéad Gleeson, Fady Joudah, Ahmed Masoud, Siobhán McSweeney, Mark O’Connell, Sally Rooney and Bana Abu Zuluf. There will also be music from Colm Mac Con Iomaire and Poor Creature. Proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Tickets are now on sale via Ticketmaster.

More than 14,000 civilians, including more than 5,500 children, have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip since October 7th. The supply of clean water, medicine, food, and fuel has been greatly restricted in what UN Secretary-General António Guterres has described as “more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity.”

As this continues, the need for aid only becomes more pressing, and more writers are showing their support with a second fundraiser on December 7th in Project Arts. Poet Erin Fornoff will host an evening of poetry by Irish and Palestinian writers with participants including Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Seán Hewitt, Jessica Traynor, Majed Mujed, Mustafa Keshkeia, Jane Clarke and special guest Stephen Rea. There will also be music from Farah Elle. Tickets are on sale now from the Project Arts website.

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Books by Liz Nugent, Paul Murray, Katriona O’Sullivan, Mark O’Connell, Eimear Ryan and editors Lucinda Jacob and Sarah Webb along with illustrator Ashwin Chacko are in the running for the accolade of An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023.

The titles were drawn from the category winners at the An Post Irish Book Awards, and were chosen on the principle of the highest number of votes secured during the shortlist voting process across all categories.

The six nominated titles are: Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent (Sandycove); The Bee Sting – Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House); Poor – Katriona O’Sullivan (Sandycove); A Thread of Violence – Mark O’Donnell (Granta Books); I Am the Wind: Irish Poems for Children Everywhere – Edited by Lucinda Jacob and Sarah Webb, illustrated by Ashwin Chacko (Little Island Books); The Grass Ceiling – Eimear Ryan (Sandycove)

The overall ‘An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023′ winner will now be decided by a judging panel: Madeleine Keane, literary editor of the Sunday Independent; Eason Must Reads books ambassadors Sinead Moriarty and Rick O’Shea; Cyril McGrane of An Post; Elaina Ryan, CEO of Children’s Books Ireland; and Tómas Kenny general manager of Kenny’s bookshop, Galway. The winner will be revealed during a one-hour television special hosted by Oliver Callan on RTÉ One on December 6th at 10.35pm.

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The Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, is seeking submissions to The 2023 John McGahern Annual Book Prize, which it set up, with the approval of John McGahern’s literary estate, in 2019. The prize of £5,000 will be awarded to the best debut work of fiction – either novel or collection of short stories – by an Irish writer, or writer resident in Ireland for more than five years, published in 2023.

A condition of the prize is that the winner must be available to attend a reading and book signing as part of the Liverpool Literary Festival, due to be held in October 2024. Travel costs (to the value of £150) and overnight accommodation will be covered. Should social distancing rules make a public event impracticable, a digital announcement, including a video to which the winner contributes, will be made instead.

The deadline is December 8th. Please note that both a physical and a digital submission are required. All submissions should be accompanied by a submission form which can be downloaded here and which contains further details. Contact fshovlin@liverpool.ac.uk with any queries.

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The Cúirt New Writing Prize is now open for submissions in three categories - Short Fiction, Poetry, and Poetry and Short Fiction in Irish, judged by Sara Baume, Elaine Feeney and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. The winner in each category will be awarded a €500 cash prize and the opportunity to read at Cúirt! The closing date for submissions is Monday, 29th January 2024 at 5pm. Click here for more details.

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Bob Mortimer, an author who “has this strange ability to keep the reader on the very brink of guffawing for whole chapters at a time,” has won the 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for The Satsuma Complex, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. He receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, the complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection, and a pig named after his winning book. The ceremony took place at The Goring Hotel in London.

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Galway academic Prof Jane Conroy from the Rosmuc Gaeltacht has received the Commandeur Des Palmes Academiques at the French embassy in Dublin this week. Anthropologists George Dumezil and Claude Levi Strauss ar eamong among previous recipients.

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The mysterious logic of the world’s first writing systems will be shared by ancient language expert Dr Martin Worthington at a free public talk in Trinity College Dublin next week.

The talk, entitled ‘Pictures to words – parsing the logic of early Cuneiform’, forms part of the Trinity Centre for the Book seminar series. It will take place on Wed, 29th Nov, 4.30-6pm in Trinity Long Room Hub. “For over half of human history, from before 3000 BC to after the ‘year zero’, there were people writing in the cuneiform script – probably the oldest writing system in the world. In its mature form the script includes over 800 signs each with several different meanings. I will explore how these meaning developed and the logic by which they were assigned to signs.

“For example, the sign for ‘to mix’ goes back to a picture of a cake – an association we can easily relate to today. Similarly, the verb ‘to suck’ was represented by putting the sign for ‘milk’ inside the sign for ‘mouth’ – no doubt a reference to babies sucking milk from their mothers.” See here for more information.

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Journalist and author Ed Yong has won the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize for his book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

Yong immerses the reader in the fascinating and complex dimensions of the animal kingdom, revealing the multisensory ways in which animals experience the world around them. The book is a call for empathy and curiosity from humanity to protect the “majesty” of the natural world.

Yong reported for The Atlantic from 2015 until 2023, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the coronavirus pandemic.

His work has also featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many other publications. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize and 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize.

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Details of a new international artist residency programme that aims to promote and highlight the artistic legacy of Irish playwright, novelist, poet and Nobel prize winner Samuel Beckett will be announced by Irish theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland at an event at the Irish Embassy in Paris this evening (23.11.23).

Located in the French village of Méricourt, less than an hour northwest of Paris on the river Seine, Atelier Samuel Beckett offers professional artists of all disciplines with an interest in the work of the Irish author self-contained accommodation and dedicated workspaces, including a Beckett-focused library and rehearsal space, to reflect, study, research and develop their practice.

The artist residency is the brainchild of director Judy Hegarty Lovett and actor Conor Lovett, joint artistic directors of Irish theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland, which specialises in innovative stage productions of the novels, short stories and plays of Samuel Beckett. As part of their residency, artists will have the opportunity to meet with the Beckett experts of Gare St Lazare Ireland to avail of mentorship and advice.

“When Conor and I first arrived in Méricourt 23 years ago, we were gifted a place to live for a period of time,” said Ms Hegarty Lovett. “This allowed us to hone our skills and to fully immerse ourselves in Beckett’s work and, during this time, we developed much of the repertoire with which we have been touring internationally for the last two decades. We understand how important it is for artists to have space – both physical and mental – to think, work and create in an inspiring environment and without distractions.”

Mr Lovett added: “Even though Beckett lived in France for more than 50 years, up until now, there was no place or building in the country dedicated to his memory. We are honoured to have received permission from Samuel Beckett’s nephew and keeper of his estate, Edward Beckett, to name both the residency programme and the physical residence ‘Atelier Samuel Beckett’. It is a place wholly dedicated to his life and legacy, and to artistic creation.”

Currently, five bursaries for three-week artistic residencies at Atelier Samuel Beckett are confirmed for 2024. The bursaries in place are as follows: two bursaries supported by Galway Culture Company, University of Galway and Gare St Lazare Ireland; one supported by Art for Human Rights; one supported by the Embassy of Ireland in Paris and Beckett Festival de Roussillon; as well as a privately funded Irish bursary, known as the ‘Ireland Eyes Bursary’. Additional bursaries for 2024 are at the advanced planning stage. Bursaries cover a stipend for the artist, as well as travel costs, self-catering accommodation, and mentoring from Gare St Lazare Ireland.

Ms Hegarty Lovett said: “Through partnerships with various funders, we have so far secured five bursaries for artist residencies at Atelier Samuel Beckett for which artists of all disciplines can apply. We are finalising plans for additional bursaries at present and hope to develop further partnerships in the coming months. We encourage anyone interested in supporting artists to attend Atelier Samuel Beckett to contact us.”