Hermione Lee to share biographer’s secrets
Writing literary biography has huge rewards, but what are its challenges and frustrations? Hermione Lee, a veteran in the field, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, will speak on all this – and share details of the tactics needed to write something masterful – when she speaks in Dublin next month. Lee has also written lives of Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather and is working on one of Penelope Fitzgerald. Also a broadcaster, reviewer and the first woman Goldsmiths’ professor of English at Oxford, she chaired the Man Booker jury in 2006. In 2003 she was given a CBE for services to literature. She is talking at 6pm on Friday, October 7th, at the Royal Irish Academy, on Dawson Street in Dublin; admission is free. Online booking at ria.ie.
Page-turner to remember from an Italian fighter
June is that month of literary promise when lists everywhere tell us what the great and the good plan to read during the summer break. But what of the unexpected treasure that you get around to on holidays? For me this year it was a book first published a quarter of a century ago, In Search of a Glorious Death, by the late Italian writer Carlo Mazzantini, husband of the Irish painter Anne Donnelly.
When he was 17 he ran away from home to fight the Allies during the second World War, propelled by romantic patriotism fed to him by parents and teachers. But instead of being sent to the front he was sent to the guerilla war in Piedmont.
This book was sensational when it appeared in Italy, in 1986, as A Cercar la Bella Morte, because until then it was only the Italian Resistance that had found a literary voice. No apologia, it’s the result of a grown man’s attempt to understand how a fork in the road he took as a teenager was to haunt him all his life, making him and his companions in arms, in his own words, rejects and pariahs. “There was no one willing to offer you a word or a helping hand now that your blame, isolated from any context, was fixed there for all to see.”
Apart from being a page-turner – Mazzantini witnessed the last days of Mussolini – it has an irresistible honesty. Published in English by Carcanet in 1992, it is worth recommending this year, which saw the publication in English of Twice Born, his daughter Margaret Mazzantini's bestselling novel set during the siege of Sarajevo – soon to be a film starring Penélope Cruz.
Literary line-up to salute Anthony Cronin
One of the doyens of Irish letters, Anthony Cronin has a literary career that spans half a century. His reach is wide, as he’s worked in so many genres: poetry, fiction, memoir, criticism, biography and journalism. Now a line-up of Irish writers will salute that achievement. The bill includes Dermot Healy, Dermot Bolger, Michael OLoughlin, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Cronin’s wife and fellow writer, Anne Haverty. Fittingly, the event is at the Irish Writers’ Centre, in Dublin. Cronin has over the years made a major contribution to developing the infrastructure of the arts in Ireland, including his role in getting a State building for the writers’ centre. “We have much to thank him for,” says the centre, where proceedings will kick off at 7.30pm on October 4th.
