Into the Swim of Flann's year: This really is Flann O'Brien's year. There was the celebratory conference at University College Dublin, the Mint Productions documentary on RTÉ, and The Third Policeman featuring in cult TV series Lost.
Now his comic masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, first published in 1939, has been selected for a campaign called Dublin: One City, One Book, which will run this month and next, designed to encourage people to read a book associated with Dublin by an Irish writer. It's like a city-wide book club where people can take part by reading the same book at the same time, chatting about it as they go along. It's a great way to fête a city that has such literary provenance and it's hoped it may become an annual event with a different author featured each year.
Events this month include a screening of Kurt Palm's 1997 At Swim-Two-Birds (In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vogel), described as Monty Python for intellectuals, at the Irish Film Institute on May 17th at 6.30pm. The following Saturday, May 20th, from noon to 2pm, the Jem Casey Society will tour the city centre, stopping off at St Stephen's Green, the Mansion House and O'Connell Street to read from the book. Next month's events include a Peter Costello lecture called Ringsend Cowboys (at the National Library on June 7th at 6pm) about the Dublin background to At Swim, with a response from John Wyse Jackson.
Orange evolution: Yiyun Li, the 33-year-old Chinese writer who last year won the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize in Cork, was this week one of three writers shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers, for her short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Fourth Estate). Like the main Orange Prize, this award, worth £10,000 (€14,622), is for women only - in this case for first works of fiction. The winner will be announced on June 6th.
Another writer on the list, Naomi Alderman, shortlisted for her novel, Disobedience (Viking), came to writing after witnessing the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. A marketing executive with a New York law firm, she decided to pack it in, returning to her native England to sign up for the University of East Anglia creative writing course. She says the realisation "I could just die" triggered her change of path.
"If I die working, I'd like to be doing something more meaningful to me," she said after 9/11. The third book on the list is also a novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Viking), by Russian writer Olga Grushin, who now lives in Washington DC.
Clarke the dramatist: A lesser known side of poet Austin Clarke (pictured below) will be celebrated in Dublin on Monday: his interest in verse drama. Timed to coincide with the 110th anniversary of his birth, Christopher Murray of UCD will launch The Selected Plays of Austin Clarke, chosen and introduced by academic Mary Shine Thompson and published by Colin Smythe, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre at 7pm.
"With all the justifiable fuss about Beckett and 1916, we didn't want Clarke to be forgotten altogether," says Shine Thompson, who did her UCD PhD on Clarke and hopes to write a bigger piece of work on him in the future. "I have two filing cabinets full of material on him."
Clarke wrote 17 verse plays, drawing on diverse traditions from commedia dell'arte to Irish legends.
"He retrieved the verse plays of forgotten playwrights and brought Yeats's plays back to the Abbey stage. His interest in verse-speaking led him to found, with Robert Farren, a verse- speaking society whose members also performed plays and poetry on Radio Éireann," says Shine Thompson.
Prize for soulful Norwegian: Per Petterson, a writer who has been described as "Norwegian literature's knight of masculine sensitivity", was the star of the show at the National Portrait Gallery in London this week when his novel, Out Stealing Horses, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He shares the £10,000 (€14,622) prize with his translator, Anne Born.
Petterson's debut in 1987 was a story collection. Talking about his literary development, he said that discovering the work of Raymond Carver in the 1980s "was like coming home". Out Stealing Horses was a critical triumph when published last year in English.
"Imagine American master William Maxwell finding a soulmate in a Norwegian writer, and Petterson is it," said Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Literary Correspondent.