The Byronic women
Enda O'Brien on Byron - it seems the perfect match, and he is indeed the Irish novelist's latest project. In January, Weidenfeld Nicolson will publish Byron in Love, O'Brien's biography of the great English poet, focusing particularly on the colourful women in his life.
"Lord George Gordon Byron was five feet eight inches in height, had a malformed right foot, chestnut hair, a haunting pallor, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and an enchantedness that neither men nor women could resist. Everything about him was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices," says the advance bumph on the book. Definitely promising territory for the passionate O'Brien.
The ghostly genre
Aptly for Halloween, the school of English in Trinity College Dublin is holding a conference entitled A Ghostly Genre: Short Fiction and the Supernatural, on October 24th and 25th, organised by Helen Conrad-O'Briain and Julie Anne Stevens. The keynote speaker is Peter Marshall of the University of Warwick whose book Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story, an account of ghosts and ghastly secrets in 17th-century Ireland and Britain, came out last year. The event, which will take place in the Graduate Memorial Building debating chamber, is open to the public. Other speakers include Nicholas Allen on Sheridan Le Fanu and Anne Markey on The True Artistry of Oscar Wilde: Sources and Style in The Canterville Ghost.
Joycean workshops
Poet Trevor Joyce is set to give a series of workshops at the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, where he is writer in residence. His aim is to improve participants' creative relationship with words, and the course promises to make you a better writer, whatever the genre (be it private diary, company report, poetry or fiction, or writing for stage and screen). Workshop numbers are restricted to 12 places.
Writers whose work will be drawn on in the learning curve include Borges, Nabokov, Miroslav Holub, Lorca, Beckett, Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson. The course will tackle questions such as when to use slang, familiar or intimate language. The fee is €100 for 10 weekly three-and-a-half hour sessions starting on Thursday, October 16th, 2pm-5.30pm. More details, tel: 021-4312955.
Gogarty celebration
A field trip to Omey Island will be one of the highlights of the Oliver St John Gogarty Literary Festival, from November 6th to 9th, in Gogarty's old Connemara home - Renvyle House Hotel in Connemara, Co Galway. As well as celebrating Oliver, the author of As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, his son, the barrister Noll Gogarty, will be remembered in a talk by poet and barrister John O'Donnell. O'Donnell is also giving a poetry workshop, with places for 12 people. The poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill will read at the festival too.
There will be a reading of some of Oliver St John Gogarty's poetry, limericks by Michael O'Loughlin and a poetry reading by Gerald Dawe from his book Points West. Dawe will also give a talk, A Painful Case: Samuel Beckett and Oliver St John Gogarty.
Jim Carney will talk on Louis MacNeice and Omey, while Nicola Gordon Bowe will give a lecture on the artist Harry Clarke as well as leading a field trip to see Clarke's stained glass windows at nearby Tullycross Church. www.gogartysociety.com
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