THE literary hot-bed that is the 1 Irish summer school is the topic of Elizabeth Wassell's The Honey Plain, and the party in Waterstones on Tuesday night to mark its arrival bristled with nearly as many literary folk as the novel. Elizabeth's partner, poet John Montague, was enjoying the evening as were old friends authors Anthony Cronin and Anne Haverty, who was last week awarded the prestigious Rooney prize for literature.
Poets Paula Meehan and Derek Mahon were there, as well as uileann piper, Ronan Browne and his wife, Sarah who chatted with Sarah Owens. Morning Ireland's David Hanley spoke about the book, Elizabeth and just about everything else, to much hilarity.
It was a veritable tribal gathering of O'Connors, with biographer Ulick O'Connor, author Joe O'Connor and film-maker Aine O'Connor all present: Joe O'Connor is working on a script in conjunction with the Gate Theatre and has a book coming out in the autumn. Entitled The Salesman, it's a comedy/thriller which O'Connor was determined to set in two square miles of Dublin, as a change from the wide-ranging locales of his last novel,
Meanwhile Aine O'Connor is hard at work with playwright Neil Donnelly on a screenplay for the Walter Macken story The Brown Man Of The Mountain, which they hope to begin filming next year. Aine was accompanied to the Wassell party evening by actor Gavin Murphy, who she first met while she and Gabriel Byrne were filming Draiocht. He is currently working on a screen-play, The Groover, already in development with Channel 4.
Aine also took the part of, Kathleen in a reading of yeats's The Countess Kathleen, which included Fair City actors Pat Leavy and Aine's partner, David Duffy. The reading was organised by Patrick Bergin in the Windmill Lane studios on the quays last week as he is hoping to bring three of Yeats's short plays to the screen. Bergin has already filmed two of the plays; The Cat And The Moon he directed himself and the other, Calvary, was directed by his wife, painter Paula Bergin.