LooseLeaves: In the week that saw the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Dublin's Foster Place erupt with delighted disbelief when children's author Kate Thompson won the Bisto Book of the Year award for an unprecedented fourth time on Wednesday, there were further signs of how children's literature is going from strength to strength.
St Patrick's College, Drumcondra (where the English department runs the country's only taught MA in the field), announced that it is establishing a centre for children's literature and culture studies. One of the ideas behind it is to help children take possession of their own culture, and the remit goes way beyond just books. People studying there will be able to focus on all aspects of young people's literature and culture, from the classics to games, rhymes, comics, graphic novels, films, videos, rock music, computer games, blog sites and text messaging.
Centres such as this exist in France, Germany, the United States, Britain and South Africa. The pioneering centre at St Pat's will host conferences, bring out more publications and - excitingly - bring in scholars from abroad. Drumcondra boy Bertie Ahern is so keen on it that'll he'll launch it on campus on June 12th, hopefully revealing what comics and books inspired him when he was growing up.
New entities and identities
An article Belfast-born poet John Hewitt wrote for The Irish Times in 1947 and some lines from his poem Conacre (1943) have suggested the theme for this year's annual summer school in his honour: Finding the Nation: New Entities and New Identities. Flowing from the theme will be a sequence of talks including historian Marianne Elliott on Oh, No! Not the Irish Christians Again! The Problem with Religion in Irish History; Aoife Monks, programme director of the theatre studies course at Birkbeck College, University of London, who will focus on contemporary theatre practice in Comely Maidens and Celtic Tigers: Riverdance and Irishness, one of her next projects being a book on the global performances of Irishness in the St Patrick's Day parade and Riverdance. Historian Paul Bew and former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald are also speaking, as is Claire Mitchell of Queen's University Belfast. Her special area is politics and religion, and she'll talk on Can Loyalist Identity Adapt to Political Change in the "New" Northern Ireland? Bernard MacLaverty (above) will read from his new collection, Matters of Life and Death, and Joseph O'Connor from Redemption, his sequel to Star of the Sea. Novelists Patrick McCabe, Glenn Patterson and poets Vona Groarke, Paul Durcan and Hans Magnus Enzenberger are also reading.
Incidentally, in that The Irish Times article Hewitt avowed, "I'm an Ulsterman of planter stock, I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and
English is my native tongue, so I am British. The British archipelago is offshore to the continent of Europe, so I'm European. This is my hierarchy of values and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who omits one step in that sequence of values is falsifying the situation."
The festival runs in Armagh from July 24th to 28th. www.johnhewitt.org
Tóibín joins Booker panel
The organisers of the biennial £60,000 (€87,600) Man Booker International Prize for 2007 went to three continents to form a jury for the next award and when they looked at Europe they settled on an Irishman. Writer Colm Tóibín, currently teaching at Stanford University in California, joins American Elaine Showalter and South African writer Nadine Gordimer on the panel. They will announce their 15-strong contender list in April 2007. The inaugural award last year went to Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. www.manbookerinternational.com
A writer for peace
Writer AB Yehoshua, who has been called a kind of Israeli Faulkner and who is due in Dublin next week, is also well-known in another context - as an activist in the Israeli peace movement. Yehoshua, who was born in Jerusalem, now lives in Haifa where he is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Last year he was on the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize.
An evening with AB Yehoshua takes place at the Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin 1 on June 6th at 7pm. Admission free