The shortlist for the Bisto Book of the Year Awards was announced recently at the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin. Some 200 submissions were received for the award, now in its 10th year, reflecting the increasing and ever-more-diverse market for children's books.
On the shortlist this year are: Eoin Colfer, Benny and Babe (O'Brien); Gerard Whelan, Out of Nowhere (O'Brien); illustrator Niamh Sharkey, who won last year, Jack and the Beanstalk (Barefoot); Marilyn McLaughlin, Fierce Milly (Mammoth); Louise Lawrence, The Crowlings (Collins); Marilyn Taylor, Faraway Home (O'Brien); Bill Wall, The Boy Who Met Hitler (Mercier); Mark O'Sullivan, Silent Stones (Wolfhound); writer Gabriel Rosenstock and illustrator Piet Sluis, Paidin Mhaire Mhuigin (An Gum); Mary Arrigan, Siuloid Bhrea (An Gum); and Larry O'Loughlin, Is Anybody Listening? (Wolfhound). O'Loughlin is the dad with the author daughter, Aislinn O'Loughlin. She wrote Cinderella's Fella when she was only 13, so what does one say on these occasions? Like daughter, like father? The winner will be announced on Thursday.
Stephen O'Reilly of Waterford has won the Molly Keane Memorial Creative Writing Award for his story, `The Ark'. Earlier this week, O'Reilly was presented with £500 in the Old Market House Arts Centre in Dungarvan. His hope is to have his first novel finished by the end of the year.
THE Christian Brothers might not be with us in such numbers as in previous years, but their spirit it seems will linger long in the memory of many. In the March edition of the London Review of Books, R.W. Johnson wrote a lengthy review of John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope; The Secret History of Pius XII, in which the reviewer referred in passing to the regular routine floggings he received from Christian Brothers during his childhood in England. This provoked a number of responses in the review's recent letters pages, flagged with the heading "Johnson's Bottom" (inaccurately, it transpires, as the correspondents make clear they got it on the hands, not the posterior). When one reader poured scorn and scepticism on Johnson's experiences, others responded by writing in with their own stories of physical abuse at the hands of the brothers: an outpouring you might think unusual on the pages of the LRB. In the current issue one reader outlines the rash of legal cases against the clergy in Ireland recently, while Johnson himself returns to the subject to add some details: "The Brothers were all lower-class Irish from, so to speak, a wife-beating culture and were generally Irish nationalists, so you got beaten rather more if your name was Johnson rather than, say, Sheahan." Amazing what a book review can spark off, thinks Sadbh.
DCU is looking for applicants for its writer-in-residence programme for the 2000-2001 period, which includes facilitating one workshop at the Irish Writers' Centre. Writers will be paid £12,000, but get both skates on - the closing date is June 9th. More information from DCU (01-7045000).
The name of Holocaust doubter David Irving will incite a feeling of odium in many. Readers will recall the much-publicised recent libel action taken by Irving against Penguin Books and its writer, Deborah Lipstadt. Irving had claimed that Lipstadt had wrongly accused him in her book, Denying the Holocaust, of distorting history for his own purposes and agendas. He lost the action. Penguin is now publishing the judge's summary of that case as a paperback, The Irving Judgement, which will be available from August 3rd. It's an unusually public place for such legal findings to be aired, but Penguin obviously feels very strongly about it, and has issued a statement saying: "This is a judgment of major historical and legal importance, and by publishing it we wish to bring it to the widest possible readership."
Sadbh