Barack's charge goes on
Barack Obama is definitely the new Princess Diana in terms of the publishing industry; books, magazines – in fact anything with his name on it – seems to fly off the shelves and this is reflected in the bestseller lists. Now there's to be a book about his Irish connections.
Veteran publisher at Brandon – and author – Stephen MacDonogh has been researching the US President’s Irish roots. His book Barack Obama: The Road from Moneygall: The Irish Ancestry and Background of America’s President will be published by Brandon in October. As well as taking a look at his great-great-great grandfather Falmouth Kearney, born into an Offaly Church of Ireland community in 1830 and who lived through the Famine before emigrating to America aged 19, the book promises to be an exploration of the Protestant Irish in America.
Bisto’s top ten
Roddy Doyle’s Her Mother’s Face, which tells how its central character struggles to come to terms with the death of her mother and her father’s mute grief, is among the 10 books on the shortlist for the 19th Bisto Children’s Book of the Year awards.
Last year’s posthumous winner of the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year title, Siobhan Dowd, (who died in August 2007) is also on the shortlist with her novel Bog Child which explores the Ireland of the 1980s.
Four-times previous winner of the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year, Kate Thompson, has two books shortlisted, Highway Robbery and Creature of the Night. Creature of the Night has already won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Also on the list are Eoin Colfer for Airman; Ré Ó Laighléis, Susan Edwards and Emily Colenso for An Phleist Mhór; Mary Finn for Anila’s Journey. Áine Ní Ghlinn and Carol Betera for Brionglóidí. PJ Lynch (illustrator) for The Gift of the Magi, and Oliver Jeffers for The Great Paper Caper. The total prize fund for the various awards is €19,000.
The winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 20th.
Banksters under fire
One effect of the financial crisis is the flood of books now coming out internationally aiming to expose and explain it all – and it’s happening on the home front too. Hachette Books Ireland this week announced that David Murphy, RTÉs business correspondent, and journalist and author Martina Devlin have teamed up to work on Banksters: How a Corrupt Elite Destroyed Ireland’s Wealth.
Taking their title from the term “banksters”, coined to describe the behaviour of American bankers in the 1929 stock market crash, the authors promise to show how “the Irish banking system was brought to its knees by a corrupt elite driven by profit and greed”.
The book will be published this summer and followed in the autumn by Shane Ross’s The Bankers (Penguin Ireland), telling the story of how the banks got themselves – and the country at large – into the current situation, while focusing on the people who made it happen. It’s the big story of the moment, so without doubt more books will follow.
Harpur for the Hartnett
Poet James Harpur is the winner of the Michael Hartnett Annual Poetry Award 2009 for his collection, The Dark Age.
Judges Moya Cannon, Peter Denman and Richard Tillinghast, announcing their decision, said: “Harpur has dared to delve seriously into themes which are too often left unvisited in the 21st century. The poetry makes a long journey into interior darkness, yet there is not a hint of self-indulgence.”
The award, now in its tenth year, has a value of €6,500 and is jointly funded by Limerick County Council and the Arts Council.
The Dark Ageis Harpur's fourth collection. He is currently poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review (a publication founded by the poet and William Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine) and the literary journal Southword.
The award will be presented at the opening night of Éigse Michael Hartnett in Newcastle West, Co Limerick on Thursday, April 23rd. See lcc.ie for more.