LooseLeaves: Given the rich evocations of his life in the poems, the prospect of an autobiography by Seamus Heaney (left) is tantalising. Now it turns out that poet Dennis O'Driscoll (below) and Heaney are co-operating on a book-length interview that's been described as the closest thing to an autobiography the latter has produced.
It's signalled in the current issue of the Harvard Magazine, which has a lengthy essay on Heaney by Adam Kirsch, who was a student in one of Heaney's workshops 10 years ago. Also included is an interview Kirsch conducted by fax with the poet in September, which goes over the connection between Heaney's work as a teacher and his life as a writer.
Heaney doesn't miss teaching: "I'm learning to take my time for myself." When he was teaching he gave a lot of his mind to it, he adds. "There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over. Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense."
Of his time in Harvard, while it created wonderful conditions for him as a writer - economic safety, writers' support, intellectual self-respect and eight months to himself a year - "the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home". Poems he did write there include Alphabets and A Sofa in the Forties. Among the people he mixed with while at Harvard were Elizabeth Bishop and her companion Alice Methfessel.
Mac Cóil takes Irish prize
Liam Mac Cóil's novel Fontenoy has won the Oireachtas na Gaeilge Irish Language Book of the Year for Adults award, sponsored by Bord na Leabhar Gaeilge. Mac Cóil, who lives in the Ráth Cairn Gaeltacht in Co Meath, received €5,000. Fontenoy was hailed in The Irish Times as a work of art on publication by writer and critic Alan Titley. "The recreation of the world of the Irish soldiers of 250 years ago in their own language is a work of verbal artistry of the first order. There is no other novelist in Irish today who writes with the same care, precision, and clarity."
Mac Cóil's publisher, Leabhar Breac also received €10,000. Recognising publishers is a central plank of this awards scheme, the logic being that without them there wouldn't be an outlet for authors and illustrators to produce Irish language books. Some 200 new titles are printed in Irish every year. Annual sales are worth about €1.3 million.
The winner of the Book of the Year for Young People is An Táin by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh from Co Mayo, who received €3,000; his publisher, Cló Mhaigh Eo, received €7,000.
Two Irish eye up Eliot
Seamus Heaney (District and Circle) and Paul Muldoon (Horse Latitudes) are on the shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize 2006 run by the Poetry Book Society and awarded annually to the author of the best new collection of poetry published that year.
The other eight collections that make up the 10, selected from nearly 80 books, are: Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid by Simon Armitage; Tramp in Flames by Paul Farley; Bad Shaman Blues by WN Herbert; After by Jane Hirshfield; The Blood Choir by Tim Liardet; Swithering by Robin Robertson; Redgrove's Wife by Penelope Shuttle; and Dear Room by Hugo Williams.
The winner will be announced on January 15th, when the prize of £10,000 (€14,885) will be presented by TS Eliot's widow Valerie in London.
Paul Muldoon won the 1994 TS Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile.
The evening before the announcement the shortlisted poets are invited to give a public reading at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London. Tickets are on sale at www.thebloomsbury.com.
Kavanagh fellowship for Kiely
The trustees of the estate of Katherine Kavanagh have awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for this year to Kevin Kiely (below) from Warrenpoint, Co Down. The fellowship is worth €8,000.
Kiely's most recent
collection of poems is Breakfast with Sylvia (Lagan Press, Belfast, 2005). He is currently working on a PhD at University College Dublin on the Irish-American philanthropist, John L Sweeney, curator (1942-1969) of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. Sweeney's partner, Máire MacNeill, author of the folklore work The Festival of Lughnasa, was a daughter of Eoin MacNeill, founder of the Gaelic League and professor of early and medieval Irish history at UCD.