DUBLIN BOOK FESTIVAL: Given the times that are in it, the session on personal finance at the second Dublin Book Festival could well turn out to be a top attraction.
Caroline Madden and Laura Slattery, co-authors of The Money Book: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Your Finances (But Were Afraid to Ask)will be giving the session, along with Paul Overy, author of The Tricks of the Rich. The festival opens next Friday and runs over the weekend.
The past – and more interestingly the future – of Dáil Éireann should be another interesting session with Michael D Higgins, Gerry Adams, Conor Kostick and Risteárd Mulcahy on hand debating the issue.
Well-known Irish women writers loom large this year. Two of them will come together at an event on Sunday at 4.30pm during which Edna O'Brien will be in conversation with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Earlier that day a critical anthology on NÍ Dhuibhne's work will be launched. Titled Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: Perspectives, and edited by Rebecca Pelan, it is published by Arlen House and includes two previously unpublished stories by Ní Dhuibhne. Eugene McCabe, Mary O'Donnell, Jennifer Johnston, Alice Taylor, Medbh McGuckian, Leland Bardwell, Peter Sirr, Macdara Woods, Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, Orna Ross, Gerard Smyth, Dermot Bolger, Pat Boran, Colette Nic Aodha, Mary O'Malley, Gerry Murphy and Theo Dorgan are among more than 100 writers, journalists and social commentators taking part at the events in City Hall. Other current affairs events include former RTÉ Washington correspondents, Carole Coleman and Mark Little and journalist and author Niall Stanage discussing the ascent of Barack Obama and the "New America" while Senator Dan Boyle, Feidhlim Harty, Michael Kelly and Conor Pope will explore how we can live in a green way on a budget.
Children's events with writers and storytellers including Kate Newmann, Gabriel Rosenstock, Linda Moller, Celine Kiernan, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin and Gabriel Fitzmaurice are another major feature of the festival. There's also a forum called Developing Children's Publishing in Ireland: Towards an Action Plan- with Michael O'Brien, Siobhán Parkinson, Mags Walsh, Sarah Bannan and Seamus Cashman, which kicks off on Friday at 10am.
On both Friday and Saturday evening in the festival bar – the Lord Edward – novelist Pat McCabe will be spinning the discs on his Radio Butty literary wireless extravaganza. Entry free. The festival, which runs from March 6th to March 8th in Dublin’s City Hall on Dame Street, also features a bookshop and cafe. See dublinbookfestival.com
A stinging tale
The 2008 Stinging Fly Prize, which goes each year to a writer who has published work – poetry or fiction – in the magazine and who has yet to publish a book has gone to Orlaith O'Sullivan for her story A Tall Tale. Originally from Dublin, O'Sullivan now lives in Baltimore, Co Cork. She has been writing full-time since 2006 and is now finishing a novel while also writing more stories and a screen adaptation of The Female Quixoteby Charlotte Lennox.
The prize was judged by poet Sinéad Morrissey who said that nothing surprised her as much as A Tall Tale; “a suicide-story in the voice of a small boy born with primordial dwarfism (MOPD Type II).” Drawn into the boy’s mind from the opening sentence, and staying with him to the end, Morrissey – who is also a lecturer in creative writing at Queen’s University, Belfast – said she experienced that intoxicating dissolution of boundaries between reader and author that all writers dream of and very few achieve. This could only come about when the machine was so carefully put together: “Its running is flawless and we don’t even notice the mechanism. There was no sense of wasted space in this writing. The voice drove it, and through that voice came everything else we needed to know: his
loneliness; his mother’s stultifying love; the bullying; the history of painful medical intervention.”
The €1,000 prize includes a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan. A Tall Talewas published in the Summer 2008 edition (Issue 10 volume two) of the magazine.