Sir, – For your writer Rosita Boland (Life & Culture, May 1st), the inclusion of history events in the programme of last week’s Cúirt literary festival in Galway was “a baffling piece of programming”. The contributions of historians Niall Whelehan, Sonja Tiernan and John Borgonovo, she writes, had “no connection with literature or even with the arts in its most general form”.
As the originator of the history strand at this year’s Cúirt, and the chairperson of the event that Rosita Boland attended in the Mechanics’ Institute, I wonder whether she is not being overly precious in her definitions of “literature” and “the arts”. Tiernan, Borgonovo and Whelehan are all fine writers. Why should they be excluded from a literary festival, especially since Theodor Mommsen (1902) and Winston Churchill (1953) earned the Nobel Prize for Literature for their historical writings? – Yours, etc,