Edna O'Brien goes back to college: It's good for university literature faculties to have practitioners attached - internationally known writers who can act as guiding lights and bring the excitement of writing to students within the groves of academe. And next Thursday sees the installation of Edna O'Brien as adjunct professor in the school of English and drama at UCD.
The timing of the appointment coincides with publication later this year of her new novel The Light of Evening and also with the recent publication by Carysfort Press of Edna O'Brien: New Critical Perspectives (€20). Its editors - Kathryn Laing, Sinéad Mooney and Maureen O'Connor - write in their introduction about ambivalent attitudes that exist to a writer who also has iconic status: "The 'Irish Colette' or 'Irish Françoise Sagan', the Connemara Dietrich invoked in reviews suggests at once exoticism, foreignness, and a suspicion about authenticity and literariness." These contradictions are highlighted in one of the essays in the book by Rebecca Pelan, director of women's studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. "Edna O'Brien exists as a writer who remains one of the most commercially successful ever to come out of Ireland, who is known to readers in many different places, who has never been ambiguous about her Irish identity (she may have expressed ambivalence about it, but never ambiguity), yet who continues to be largely assessed by the literary critical world as someone who is, on the one hand, a personality who should not be taken too seriously as a writer . . . and, on the other, as a likeable, but bold, girl who keeps misbehaving, and who regularly has her work assessed on grounds other than its literary qualities." Many of the contributions in the book are drawn from a conference on O'Brien at NUI Galway last year.
Writing is for life at UCD
It's quite a coup for UCD to have Edna O'Brien on board. In addition, next Thursday she will be presented with the UCD Ulysses Medal at a ceremony that will also see the launch of the university's Ireland Life-Writing Archive. Stemming from the belief that anything written about life in Ireland could be of interest to scholars in the future, the project invites people, including Irish emigrants and new Irish citizens from other countries, to add their reminiscences to its archive. Submissions can be of any length and in any written form, and in English, Irish or any other language.
It doesn't matter how old or how "unliterary" the material. Everyone can be a writer in the internet age. Regularly on the books desk we get calls from people who've written memoirs they'd like published. The occasional one gets snapped up but others are destined to spend eternity sitting on a hard drive or gathering dust under the bed - where in terms of literary merit they may be best off. But as Irish life changes with the speed of light, researchers may find invaluable nuggets in such material; hence the new archive - and if a top literary agent comes along with a cheque book to sign one of these Irish memoirists up, copyright remains with the author.
Details from Dr Eibhlín Evans, The Ireland Life-Writing Project, School of English and Drama , UCD Belfield, Dublin 4, tel: 01-7168530, e-mail: eibhlin.evans@ucd.ie
Zadie staggers across the line
Zadie Smith has featured on shortlists for so many mainstream literary prizes that when she finally won the £30,000 (€43,460) Orange Prize for Fiction on Tuesday night it was like watching a marathon runner finally stagger across the finish line. It took the judges a record three hours to opt for her third novel On Beauty, thereby giving a significant accolade to a writer who has been in the literary limelight since famously getting a £250,000 (€362,180) publishing deal for her first novel White Teeth. "It's about being counted and being part of English writing," was her reaction. But she has no plans for a new book: "The pipe is dry." Given that she's only 30, it's hopefully only a temporary hiatus.
Trieste jumping for Joyce
The 10th Annual Trieste Joyce School kicks off on June 25th in the Italian city Joyce called "my second country" and which was his home for 11 years from 1905. Speakers will include historian Cormac O'Grada on the Dublin Jewish community and Leopold Bloom; and John McCourt (co-founder of the school in 1997 with Renzo Crivelli) on Joyce's relationship with Irish
Catholicism and Irish anti-clericalism. Joyce's reception in Eastern Europe and the importance of the manuscripts in the Joyce collection at Dublin's National Library are also up for discussion. Events continue until July 1st.