The Irish Literary Times

Irish writer Roddy Doyle clearly loves to talk - and his characters do too, in their own lively, expletive-ridden way. Doyle's new novel "The Guts" brings back Jimmy Rabbitte from the "Barrytown Trilogy".

The story of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown’s 1919 journey across the Atlantic in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber—the first nonstop transatlantic flight—is a true one. What made you decide to use it as fictional material in this...

Oh, Lord, there are so many ways to answer this question. The quick, brutal version is that I began a novel a while ago, for which I was interested in the transatlantic journeys of two great Americans, Frederick Douglass, in 1845, and Senator George Mitchell in the nineteen-nineties. Both made spectacular and important visits to Ireland, and I was entranced by the idea of telling their stories.

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So says Happy Days festival director Seán Doran of Beckett. Doran’s aim is to break new ground, and with the celebration of the playwright in Enniskillen he has pulled that off