LooseLeaves:Veteran novelist William Boyd, whose spy saga, Restless, lost out to debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney, on Wednesday when the winner of the one-time Whitbread, now Costa Book of the Year Award, was announced in London, has something else in his sights already.
He's to guest-edit the 100th issue of Granta magazine in January 2008 as a way of marking this milestone in the periodical's history. Boyd will be putting together an expanded edition with new contributions from many of the famous names from Granta's past.
"Granta is a unique and wonderfully stimulating magazine. It has been both a shaper and arbiter of literary taste and standards for a quarter of a century and yet it still manages to seem fresh, startling and challenging. It has become one of the enduring touchstones of our cultural life," says Boyd, limbering up for the task.
Meanwhile, the next issue of the magazine, Granta 97, will be the second in its series taking the temperature of what's on offer from young American writers. Best of Young American Novelists II is out in May, featuring new work by 20 writers aged 35 and under, selected as the most interesting new voices in US fiction by a panel of judges including AM Homes and Edmund White. The first volume in the series, published in 1996, included Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore and, some felt, set the literary agenda for a generation. It will be fascinating to see who'll make the running this time round.
Joycean championed
One of the early champions of James Joyce, Niall Montgomery - poet, architect and one of the founding members of the Dublin Joyce Society in 1954, along with CP Curran, Lennox Robinson, Seamus Kelly, Myles na gCopaleen (Brian O'Nolan) and others - will be remembered in Dublin at 6.30pm on Monday at the James Joyce Centre, 35 North Great George's Street in a lecture by Christine O'Neill.
Among others speaking in the centre's lecture series over the coming months are Vincent Deane, co-editor of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo; Supreme Court judge Adrian Hardiman; Cormac Ó Gráda, author of the recently published Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, which paints such a vibrant picture of this country's once-thriving Jewish community, now so sadly diminished; and Brenda Maddox , biographer of Nora Barnacle.
Blasket sound and vision
It's not often you see Blasket islanders in action on the silver screen, but that's what's on offer on February 21st (at 6pm in the National Library of Ireland on Dublin's Kildare Street) at a screening of West of Kerry (1938). The film is based on a love story by Donal O'Cahill and was shot on location in Dublin and on the Great Blasket Island before the island was evacuated in the 1950s. Produced by Butcher Films, it stars singer Delia Murphy and features islanders in minor roles, including shots of them racing naomhógs on the Blasket Sound.
The special screening of this early Irish film will be introduced by Sunniva O'Flynn, of the Irish Film Institute, and Bob Monks, of the National Library, both experts on Irish film history. The event is in conjunction with the National Library exhibition, If I Were a Blackbird: the Lives of Delia Murphy and Dr TJ Kiernan, running until March 30th. Admission to the screening is free, but places are limited and will be given out on a first come, first served basis.
In Higgins's footsteps
The 80th birthday of Aidan Higgins, author of Langrishe, Go Down (1966) and hailed by Annie Proulx as one of our great writers ("the pure architecture of his sentences takes the breath out of you"), is being celebrated with the encouragement of creative writing in mind. As well as a festival in his honour on May 4th, 5th and 6th in Celbridge, Co Kildare, where Higgins was born, there's an international prose writing competition with a first prize of €1,000. Novel extracts, stories or "whatever you wish", up to 4,000 words long, can be submitted before March 1st by post to The Footsteps of Aidan Higgins, Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare. There is a €10 fee per entry. Details: www.kildare.ie
Yorkshire voice in Dublin
Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage will read at Trinity College Dublin's Literary Society next Friday, February 16th, at 6pm in the Davis Theatre, introduced by Dennis O'Driscoll. Tickets are on sale at the door for €5 each. Details from tennantj@tcd.ie.