Kennelly honoured: Irish Pen have a knack of picking great winners for their Irish Pen Award for Literature and this year is no exception. On the 29th of this month, the 2010 gong will go to poet Brendan Kennelly at a dinner in the Royal St George Yacht Club in Dún Laoghaire, presented by David Norris.
The new chair of Irish Pen, poet and playwright Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, said Kennelly was a dynamo on the Irish literary scene. “And he’s one of the most generous people when it comes to supporting other writers.’’
Calling all book clubs
Lionel Shriver, the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevinand The Post-Birthday World, plus US essayist, poet, short-story writer, funeral director and winner of the American Book Award, Thomas Lynch, are in the line-up for the fourth annual Ennis Book Club Festival, which takes place from March 5th-7th. The three-day programme of events includes a Book Club of the Year Award, and will bring hundreds of book club members – and readers generally – to the Co Clare town.
Festival chair Ciana Campbell says there has been a surge in membership among new and existing book clubs in Ireland, and this increase is the focus of a questionnaire on the festival website which aims to gather information on the scale and nature of book club activity nationwide
This year's line up also includes writers Joseph O'Connor, Paul Durcan, Claire Keegan, Paul Howard (Ross O'Carroll-Kelly), Claire Kilroy and Knute Skinner. During the Sunday Symposiumevent, Tim Pat Coogan, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Eoghan Harris and Diarmaid Ferriter will take part in a panel discussion, Reading History. Academic contributors include Paul Delaney, who will lead a discussion on Colm Tóibín's work, and Niall MacMonagle, who will present a workshop, How to Read a Novel.
The festival also invites library staff to a free workshop on how to start, develop and challenge a book club, which will cover areas such as managing group dynamics, injecting life and bringing new ideas to reading groups.
Tickets from Glór box office 00353656843103 / boxoffice@ glor.ie. Further details on ennisbookclubfestival.com twitter.com/ebcf, info@ ennisbookclubfestival .com and 087-9723647/ 085- 7758523.
Landscapes in view
An evening lectures series entitled Landscape in Literature, directed by Amanda Piesse and run by the school of English at TCD, kicks off at 7.30pm on January 26th when Brendan O'Connell will cover Landscape and Loss in Medieval Elegy. Other topics to look forward to include: Swift, Dublin and the Urban Landscape, by Ian Campbell Ross; Landscape and Jane Austen, by Darryl Jones; Cloudscapes – Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, Mahon, by Nicholas Grene; Burned Countryside – Reading Irish Poetry of Warfrom W B Yeats to Eavan Boland, by Gerald Dawe and Seeing New Englandly – Writing a Region, by Philip Coleman.
The full series costs €45 or €6 for each lecture. Concessions €30/€4 . The venue is the Uí Chadhain Theatre in the Arts Building. See tcd.ie/OWC/news for more or tel: 01-8962885
