From Galway to the Gate: This week’s notable literary events around Ireland

There are few places I would rather be this week than Galway for the annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which features Irish writers of renown such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Edna O’Brien as well as Laurent Binet, who was responsible for one of the most critically acclaimed novels of recent times, last year’s HHhH.

From the perspective of emerging writers, one of the events to catch the eye is Over The Edge’s reading evening, which takes place in the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday afternoon (4.30pm), features readings from several writers including Cúirt New Irish Writing fiction prize winner Hugo Kelly and does not have a cover charge.

Michael Harding (feature interviewee in today’s Sunday Times culture magazine) will read in somebody’s kitchen, Keith Ridgway and Leanne O’Sullivan will give fiction and poetry workshops respectively – although you’re probably too late for those as the deadline to apply passed a fortnight ago –  festival director Dani Gill will interview Binet and Sheila Heti (the author of this year’s How should a person be?) on characterisation in the novel and Lucy Caldwell (whose All the Beggars Riding was published earlier this year) and Indian-American poet and novelist Tishani Doshi will talk about the origins of stories with Galway City Arts Officer James C. Harrold.

And all that’s nowhere close to even the half of it. Download the full Cúirt programme here (pdf 17MB).

What: Cúirt International Festival of Literature

Where: Galway (multiple venues … including kitchens)

When: Tuesday-Sunday

Find out more: www.cuirt.ie

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If you happen to be around Belfast with some time on your hands this week, you could do much worse things than make a date with Brian Friel’s Translations, directed by Adrian Dunbar.

Where: Grand Opera House

When: Tuesday-Saturday, 7.30pm; Matinees Thursday and Saturday, 2.30pm.

How much: £11.25-£28

Find out more: http://www.goh.co.uk/translations

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Peter Gowen, originally from Youghal and now based in London with his family, is a playwright by spare time, actor by night and chef by day – “corporate fine dining, cooking for bankers, hedge fund managers and VIP clients,” he said this week. His latest play, which he performs himself, is entitled The Chronicles of Oggle, which has been eight years in the making and aspires to treat big Irish themes with an Irish sense of humour. It is also the debut production of the Everyman County Touring Initiative.

Where: Everyman Palace, Cork

When: Monday-Thursday, 8pm

How much: €9-€15

Find out more: http://www.everymanpalace.com/category/mon-22-thu-25-apr/

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It’s more than 30 years now since Frank McGuinness’s Factory Girls was first staged at the Abbey Theatre. The story of five women who stage a lock-in in a shirt factory in Co. Donegal when faced with losing their jobs is as relevant now as it was then.

Where: Millennium Forum, Derry

When: Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm; Matinee Saturday, 5pm

How much: £12.50-£16.50

Find out more: http://www.millenniumforum.co.uk/content/factory-girls-frank-mcguinness-city-factory

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Banned for 32 years after it was written, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession is now regarded as one of his finest plays and it is currently on an extended run at the Gate. Variously described as “magnificent”, “stunning” and with “exceptionally high performances” by the national media, the production stars Sorcha Cusack, Tadhg Murphy and Bosco Hogan.

Where: Gate Theatre, Dublin

When: Monday-Saturday, 7.30pm; Matinee Saturday 2.30pm

How much: €25

Find out more: http://www.gatetheatre.ie/production/MrsWarrensProfession

Four on Friday: Translations, the Kerry Group award, Ulysses liberated and Mike McCarthy on TV

Translation is experiencing something of a rebirth. Half of the shortlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award announced recently were originally published in a language other than English, while a small outfit such as Peirene Press is forging a solid reputation as a translator of note – Peirene’s canon of novellas (four books and one theme each year) are now available in Chapters Books.

So Rosita Boland’s piece on the art of translation, in the Irish Times culture blog section today, is a timely one.

“Translation is the art of losses, you always have to lose something,” says one translator succinctly; thinking about loss while engaging in the creative process is quite artful in itself.

I particularly like the line from András Imreh, who has translated the work of Seamus Heaney into Hungarian:

I had never been to any bog, because there are none in Hungary. I was taken to one here. I don’t remember any concrete words or individual metaphors that were solved as a result of the visit, but seeing the bog gave me a wall to put my back to.

The shortlist for this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year was announced this week, with Lucy Caldwell, Gavin Corbett, Claire Kilroy, Kathleen MacMahon and Thomas O’Malley making the grade.

There are summaries of the novels and extensive quotes from all five shortlisted authors, as well as adjudicator Robert McCrum, over here.

Here’s what O’Malley, nominated for This Magnificent Desolation (Bloomsbury), had to say:

You write in isolation and you have your good days and your bad days and sometimes the sense that anyone will ever read your work let alone understand and appreciate what you’re attempting to do seems very far away indeed, yet it is the hope and faith that some audience out there will connect to your work that, in part, sustains you as you write.

I’ve yet to read This Magnificent Desolation, but it ranks as the best cover of any Irish book I’ve seen this year (right).

James Joyce must be out of copyright, right? There’s hardly a week that goes by without another Joyce story or treatment or evolution. My favourite this week is on a crowdfunding project to publish a fine print edition of The Works of Master Poldy, undertaken by Irishman Jamie Murphy and American Steve Cole of Liberate Ulysses.

More on the project, the basis of which lies in a line from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, and which aims to find funding through crowd-investment tool Indiegogo, can be found here.

Writes Billy Mills in the Guardian:

There’s something about a well-made physical object with good design, quality materials and fine printing that no digital substitute can match.

Amen to that.

Finally this week, a pointer to the TV3 Player for an interview with acclaimed Mayo writer Mike McCormack on his new edition of Getting It In The Head, amongst other writing related diversions.

Not long before he was signed by Lilliput Press a couple of years ago, he said, he was doing a reading in Dublin when…

one person showed up, and I think she’d just ducked in out of the rain.

A couple of books and TV appearances later, things are a fair bit rosier these days.

Unfortunately the show isn’t broken into segments on the TV3 website so you might have to sit through a full HD streamed ad break and a bit of other fluffy stuff from Sybil and Martin before you get to the Mike McCormack interview. No-one said it had to be easy, but in the interest of saving you from the worst of it, the interview starts at around the 28:30 mark.

The Morning Show, Wednesday, April 17th

Would you like to join the Irish Writing Blog online book club? The April choice is Strumpet City by James Plunkett – more details here.

Four on Friday … Including Seamus Heaney, Lucy Caldwell and Nuala Ní Chonchúir

In the first instalment of a new (hopefully) weekly selection of (mostly) Irish writing-related reading from around the web: Seamus Heaney’s favourite places, Lucy Caldwell on double lives, Nuala Ni Chonchuir’s novel fear and some bookclub tips.

The seven wonders of Seamus Heaney’s world

Not being a steadfast reader of The Economist, I didn’t know much about Intelligent Life magazine before this piece appeared on my radar over the past couple of days. Intelligent Life comes from that stable every two months, promising to take an Economist-like view on non-economic matters.

Extra marks for guessing which of Seamus Heaney’s seven wonders – boxed off cleverly by journey, beach, hotel, city, building, view and work of art – is in Ireland.

Lucy Caldwell’s latest

The young Belfast writer’s third novel, All the Beggars Riding, is published by Faber, and it received a major shunt towards the bestsellers’ lists with the announcement that it is the Belfast choice for “One City One Book” in 2013.

Dublin memoirist, novelist and playwright Peter Sheridan is one of the influences – alongside architect Louis Kahn and author Blake Morrison – for All the Beggars Riding, a study of infidelity and secrecy over a couple of generations.

Read the Lucy Caldwell interview over at Faber’s The Thought Fox blog

Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s fear

It’s brave of any writer to give updates of works in progress, which is exactly what Nuala Ní Chonchúir did on her Women Rule Writer blog this week.

Describing a “serious novel-wobble” during the course of her current project, a historical novel set in the 19^th century, she gave a glimpse of the novelist’s perennial state of mind by relaying a snippet of a recent conversation with her contemporary Claire Kilroy:

Me: “I’m at The Fear stage.”

Claire: “Is there any other stage in novel writing?”

There were 27 comments at the time of writing this, so the post clearly struck a chord with lots of readers and writers out there. At the very least, it will make most of those who read it keep an eye out for said Nuala Ní Chonchúir historical novel when it lands on bookshelves at some as yet unspecified date in the future.

Book-club tips

Though still in the process of sifting through the gold from the groan when it comes to bookish online resources, a few decent pieces have come my way on Book Riot over the past few weeks. This one – tips for running a successful book club – might not have been the most earth-shattering, but it goes in here to allow for another little pointer to the blog’s first ever book club gathering, which is dipping its toe in the unknown waters of online meet-ups this month.

If you’d still like to get involved in the first ever Irish Writing Blog book club virtual get-together – note to self: think of a snappier name – then get your hands on a copy of Mary Costello’s The China Factory, drop me a line at irishwritingblog@gmail.com and clear a couple of hours for an online back-and-forth after 9pm (Irish time) on Monday, February 25^th.

Shane

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