On The Town:A zealous young literary festival curator in Galway phones Seamus Heaney for a favour. Would the poet have a number for a fellow Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott? Heaney obliges with a contact in Trinidad, and the sigh of relief can be heard east of the Shannon.
Next, the long-distance phone call on a short-distance budget. "Are you the woman who knows Derek Walcott?" the curator, Michael Diskin asks, breathlessly. There's a short pause, and then the memorable response: "Why, every woman here knows Mr Walcott . . ."
Diskin, former curator of Cúirt's International Festival of Literature, was in sparkling form as he introduced this year's festival programme in the King's Head, Galway, on Thursday night. The laughs came loudest from those who know him only as the taciturn "big man at the back of the house" (his own description). Manager of the Town Hall Theatre for more than a decade, he is now moving to the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
He will be tempted back, no doubt, by this year's Cúirt line-up, with writers Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Joseph O'Connor and Rebecca Miller among almost 60 writers booked for 40 events next month. Isolation, imprisonment and homelessness are the themes, according to programme director Maura Kennedy, and the programme will focus on the capacity for literature to redeem "lost" lives.
Former New York death row prisoner Sunny James, who was found innocent, and Guardian columnist on prison life, Erwin James, will discuss writing in and about prison with Dermot Healy and Bernadette Butler - both of whom work in Castlerea Prison's education unit. Resistance and occupation in Latin America and the Arab world will be addressed by Lahore-born novelist and broadcaster, Tariq Ali.
There's much more, including a reading in Castlerea, the bardic brunch and poetry slam and a trip to Brigit's Garden in Roscahill. However, there was a distinct ripple of excitement on hearing Galway Arts Centre (GAC) managing director Tomas Hardiman confirm two exhibitions by German-born artist Joe Boske. Boske, who has designed many memorable posters for Cúirt and the Galway Arts Festival, is staging a retrospective in GAC, and a cartoon collaboration with Tom Mathews in the Town Hall Theatre.
• Cúirt runs Apr 24-29. Tickets are on sale from the Town Hall Theatre box office at tel: 091-569777 or e-mail tht@galwaycity.ie. - Lorna Siggins
Becoming stars at the Jane event
Young Irish stars featuring in Becoming Jane, which had its Irish premiere in Dublin this week, stole the show as they walked up the red carpet and posed for photographers. The film's stars, Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, didn't make the event but Irish actors Sophie Vavasseur, Gina Costigan, Tara Nixon-O'Neill and Philip Culhane (from Trim, Co Meath, who plays Jane Austen's young and profoundly deaf brother) were all at the opening in the Savoy Cinema.
"I never went to drama school . . . I had to use instinct and hope for the best," said Culhane.
The film's costume designer, Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, from Limerick, was also there with her husband, Bernard Walsh.
The film's British director, Julian Jarrold, said the film's sad ending is "in some ways triumphant because we are celebrating the emergence of the greatest English novelist". Becoming Jane tells how the young Jane Austen fell in love with a dashing young lawyer from Limerick, Tom Lefroy.
"It's usually a footnote in biographies but . . . this is one of the key moments in her life," said Jarrold before the screening of the film, which was shot in Ireland last year at locations such as Kilruddery House in Co Wicklow, Higginsbrook near Trim, Co Meath, and Henrietta Street in Dublin.
Jarrold believes Hathaway "brings an accessibility" to the part of Austen. "There's an image of Jane Austen as severe, stuffy, a bit forbidding," he said, whereas the film focuses on the author when she was "21 and exuberant".
Others at the screening included Kevin Hood, who co-wrote the film with Sarah Williams, producer Douglas Rae, and one of the Irish producers, James Flynn, who said the film brought about €8 million into Ireland. CF
• Becoming Jane opens nationwide next Fri, Mar 16
Actors queue to learn the secret
A roll-call of actors crowded into Dubray Bookshop on Dublin's Grafton Street this week to applaud actor Karen Ardiff on the publication of her first novel, The Secret of My Face.
The book "is very much like an ensemble piece", said actor Conor Mullen, who is currently starring in RTÉ's television drama series, Rough Diamond, when he launched the novel. The journey that the book's facially disfigured heroine, Veronica Broderick, embarks upon "impacts quite profoundly on the other characters and you get to see the fragility of the human condition", he added. "That manifests itself in issues like vanity, identity, love, the power of love, the power of negative love and how that can strangle people and become a dark force."
Friends and fellow thespians queued for a signed copy of the book as cellist Eimear O'Grady played Bach suites. The winner of this year's Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for best actress, Jane Brennan, was at the event with her mother, Daphne Carroll. Both recalled acting in Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, at the Abbey 10 years ago alongside Ardiff (who herself won the best actress award in 1999).
Also queuing was Owen Roe, who won this year's Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for best actor, with his wife, actor Michele Forbes and their children, Megan (12) and Ethan (eight).
Actors Peter Hanly, Lorcan Cranitch, Cathy Belton, Dawn Bradfield, Mark Lambert, Pat Laffan, Malcolm Douglas and his wife, writer and former actor Kate Thompson, were also in attendance, as was playwright Roger Gregg, whose play, The Stuff of Myth, reopens at Dublin's Andrews Lane Theatre shortly, with Ardiff playing four of the characters. He was accompanied by his wife, Suniva O'Flynn, curator of the Irish Film Archive, and the play's director, Deirdre Molloy. CF
• The Secret of My Face, by Karen Ardiff, is published by New Island
We've got Georgia on our walls
The flowers and landscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe beguiled and moved many artists at the opening of Nature and Abstraction in Dublin this week.
"Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Wisconsin," said US ambassador Thomas C Foley when he opened the exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma). "Her Irish father and Hungarian mother were dairy farmers."
Her work is "hugely emotional and abstract", he added.
"In the best Irish tradition we are, of course, claiming Georgia O'Keeffe as one of our own, her paternal grandparents having left West Cork for America in 1848," said Eoin McGonigal SC, chairman of the Imma board.
Artist Carmel Mooney, whose glass sculpture, A Fantasy, is currently showing in the Berengo Foundation in Venice, said: "I like the way Georgia O'Keeffe approaches things and the freedom she gives to her exploration in paint and flowers, any subject."
"I like the consistency of the landscapes and that commitment. It's very rare that you get that," said artist and Imma board member Gerard Mannix Flynn. He chatted to the artist, Maedhbh McMahon, whose upcoming show in Limerick is called Amygdala, which is the part of the brain that processes fear and trauma, she explained. It opens on Thursday, April 19th, in the former Good Shepherd Convent.
Other artists at the show included Barry Flanagan, whose giant hares stood sentry along O'Connell Street last year; Alice Maher, whose work is currently on view at the UK's Brighton Museum; Alan Phelan, curator of a group show, inter-changes, which opened at Farmleigh this week; and Felim Egan, Maria Simmonds-Gooding, John Noel Smith and Patrick Scott.
Mike Fitzpatrick, artist and director of Limerick City Gallery, stood back to observe how people were responding to the paintings of O'Keeffe.
"They are really entranced by her somewhat austere, simple shapes, and are being profoundly moved by it," he said.
"I love her. I've loved her since the first moment I saw her work. They [her paintings] are so delicious and yummy," said art student Eileen Kenny, who was there with her friend, artist David Murphy.
Two friends, Phyllis Boyd and Gina Galvin, who thought the show was beautiful, singled out Purple Petunias as "wonderful". CF
• Georgia O'Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction continues at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until Sun, May 13