LooseLeaves: No sooner had John Banville, Brian Dillon and Kate Thompson triumphed in the inaugural Irish Book Awards at the Royal Irish Yacht Club in Dún Laoghaire on Wednesday night than word comes of another set of new Irish awards.
The Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards, run in association with the Irish Writers' Centre, will have a prize fund of €45,000 and are specifically for emerging
writers. Given the plethora of prizes around now, it's great to see one for writers at a time when they may need money most - at the start. The awards will go to the best first book published in five categories: fiction, poetry, children's literature, biography/literary non- fiction and the Irish language. And like the Whitbread awards in Britain, an overall Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year will be chosen from among the category winners. Fifteen judges will be on the panel. Being involved in a prize such as this is a new departure for the centre - in line, says director Cathal McCabe, with its recently redefined role as a development agency for writers. The category winners - and the overall winner - will be announced on November 2nd at Imma in Dublin.
In a nice hands-across-the-water spirit, these awards take in Britain as well as Ireland. Authors of any age born or living in Ireland or the UK for a minimum of five years are eligible. The full details of the prizes will be announced on March 13th when they'll be launched by Colm Tóibín.
The launch is open to the public but invitations must be obtained in advance from the Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. For further details, contact Grace Aungier, awards co-ordinator at the centre. www.writerscentre.ie.
All the fun of the London fair
Sessions on whether the notion of a national literature has become obsolete in a globalised, 21st-century world, on Arabic literature and on freedom of expression, presided over by Robert Silvers, co-editor of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), are among the events at the London Book Fair, which opens tomorrow and runs until Tuesday. The subject of bookselling redefining itself now that supermarkets and the internet are revolutionising the scene will also be up for debate, as will the new competitive arena of price cutting and the rise of celebrity authors, from Jamie Oliver to Jordan. There's also a session on saving various English words from extinction and an NYRB event on the joys and sorrows of book reviewing with input from NYRB reviewers including Timothy Garton Ash and James Fenton.
Tariq Ali (left) will give his response to the London bombings of last summer in a talk entitled What Should be the Writer's Priority in These Scoundrel Times? Margaret Atwood, Hari Kunzru, Karin Slaughter, Meg Roscoff, Helen Dunmore and Monica Ali are among the writers attending. Given that so many women authors will be in evidence, it's appropriate that the longlist for the women-only Orange Prize for Fiction will be announced at the fair on Monday. Dunmore and Atwood will surely be on it.
Being held for the first time in the ExCel London venue in Docklands, there's one novel aspect to this year's event: the organisers have teamed up with Thames Clippers to offer a special LBF express catamaran service from the Embankment to Canary Wharf with a shuttle bus on to the fair. No doubt when it was planned no one could have foreseen that there was going to be an Arctic aspect to the start of spring and it remains to be seen whether the originally planned riverside parties for the literati will materialise. See www.lbf-virtual.com
Writing workshop at TCD
A creative writing workshop to be held over six weeks with Carlo Gébler (left), current Arts Council of Ireland Writer Fellow at TCD, begins on Wednesday, April 5th at 7pm. To apply for a place, contact Writer Fellow's Workshop, Oscar Wilde Centre, School of English, 21 Westland Row, Trinity College, Dublin 2.
Remember Ruth
A 17-year-old who has acted in Fair City - and written in the Teen Times column of The Irish Times - has her first novel, Forget, coming out with Hodder Headline Ireland in August. Ruth Gilligan, whose book straddles the teenage/adult crossover has signed a two-book deal for a five-figure sum. All she has to do in the meantime is the Leaving Cert.