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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 26, 2012 5:40 PM
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Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. “We saved you the last of the kippers,” she says, in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning. Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 24, 2012 3:54 PM
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Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s fourth short story collection Mother America has just been published by New Island: “In Mother America and other stories mothers tattoo their children and abduct them; they act as surrogates and they use charms to cure childhood illnesses. The story ‘Letters’ sees an Irish mother cling to love of her son, though he abandoned her in New York, where loneliness is alleviated only by letters she cannot read. In ‘Queen of Tattoo’, Lydia, the tattooed lady from the Groucho Marx song, tries to understand why her son is a bad man.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 24, 2012 3:49 PM
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Gabriel Byrne cast in leading role as Quirke for BBC ONE...Based on the books by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of award-winning Irish writer John Banville), Quirke is a new series for BBC ONE adapted by screenwriters Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson and starring Gabriel Byrne in the title role. Quirke (we never get to know his Christian name) is the chief pathologist in the Dublin city morgue – a charismatic loner whose job takes him into unexpected places as he uncovers the secrets of sudden death in 1950s Dublin. I
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 23, 2012 9:03 PM
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EAVAN BOLAND, director of Stanford’s Creative Writing program and one of Ireland’s leading poets, has won a 2012 PEN award for creative nonfiction with her acclaimed collection of essays, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published last year by W.W. Norton.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 24, 2012 11:35 AM
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The subtitle for this event read ‘elevating the short for to fresh height’, but for anyone who knows the output of these two writers such additional information is unnecessary. Kevin Barry and Etgar Keret are fast becoming demigods of the modern short story, and to have them both in the same room, at the same event, is a vision of literary heaven which many short fictions fans hold in their head.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 3, 2012 10:43 PM
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FIVE POETRY collections have been shortlisted for The Irish Times dlr Poetry Now award 2012. They are Moya Cannon’s Hands (Carcanet Press), Michael Longley’s A Hundred Doors (Cape Poetry), John Montague’s Speech Lessons (Gallery Press), Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross (Faber and Faber) and Macdara Woods’s The Cotard Dimension (Dedalus Press).
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 3, 2012 8:48 PM
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A rare and welcome opportunity to enjoy two early documentary works that marked Pat Collins for greatness: Talking to the Dead is a haunting, elliptical portrait of the Irish funeral tradition, while his directorial debut Michael Hartnett – A Necklace of Wrens examines the life and times of the controversial poet.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 3, 2012 8:36 PM
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The majority of ‘lit-interested’ tourists visiting Ireland seem to show a preference for dead distingué, while ignoring a very vibrant ‘living writers’ scene. How will the new MFA in Creative Writing at American College Dublin concentrate on contemporary Irish authors and what their writing can offer students? The historical legacy of the Irish literary canon is extraordinary. Still, its weight can be a burden in terms of the perception of contemporary literary activity. The quality of writing produced in Ireland right now is remarkable. The recent Guinness world record Read For The World marathon event at the Irish Writers’ Centre was a striking snapshot of the excellence and breadth of the work of Ireland’s current writing fraternity
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 2, 2012 9:21 PM
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Ciara Moynihan talks to Gerald Dawe about life in Belfast, Galway and Dublin, and his new collection ‘Selected Poems’... Gerald Dawe is very much looking forward to his return to the west. These days, the Belfast-born poet and professor of English is flat out in Dublin, where he now lives. It is end of term, which means it is marking time at Trinity College. It’s hard to snatch a minute in the day for anything else. Soon though, very soon, he’ll be back in his beloved Galway – but not before he stops off in Westport for a reading from his new collection of poetry, ‘Selected Poems’,
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 2, 2012 12:18 PM
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‘We’d crossed three bridges to be here . . .’ Many of the poems in this enchanting and enchanted first collection are set in the early light of morning, the half-light of evening or the firelight of a damp day. Many occur by water’s edge — quayside, shore or riverbank – and abound in memorable images: the storm unfolding its rope of cloud, a speaker catching ‘the minnow of your reflection’. By conjuring seasons and landscape — and, in particular, expanses of the West of Ireland — Michelle O’Sullivan becomes a meteorologist of emotional states.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 1, 2012 6:39 PM
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Following the success of the previous schemes Síol, Údar, and Scéal, a new scheme Scéal 2 is being launched by TG4. Scéal 2 is a development scheme that offers talented new Irish-speaking writers/directors an opportunity to adapt a well-known story from Irish language literature or folklore towards a half hour short film. The chosen story can be adapted from an Irish language short story, poem, folklore or any work that represents the Irish tradition of storytelling. Successful applicants will be given the opportunity to develop the story from the basic script to the eventual production and broadcast stage.The scheme is open to Irish language writers from all over the country, whether they have screen experience or not, and to directors who wish to gain experience in television drama through Irish. All applicants will need to have a proficiency in the Irish language.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 31, 2012 8:37 PM
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Ms. Binchy’s sprawling novels of Ireland portrayed women confronting all manner of adversity. “Nowadays women realize that they are dealt a hand of cards and must play it,” Ms. Binchy told The Chicago Tribune in 1999. “There are no makeovers in my books. The ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems.”
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 29, 2012 7:36 PM
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How It's Irish: The symposium delved into Druid's presentation of DruidMurphy at the Lincoln Center Festival; a cycle of three plays by Irish writer Tom Murphy. Director Garry Hynes and actress Marie Mullen were on the final panel.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 26, 2012 4:23 PM
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Airborne is a collection of over one hundred and fifty poems by twenty-nine poets, born or living in Ireland. It is an absolute delight, and more than that, a living record of the vitality of the poetic tradition in Ireland. Seven of the poems are read by either the poet or by an actor. The musical performance of ‘Night Start’ by Paddy Bushe, is a modern, playful, reminder to us of the tradition of setting poems to music, followed by Yeats and Joyce and more recently by Leonard Cohen.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 23, 2012 9:18 PM
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Tom Williams: Raymond Chandler's estate have chosen John Banville to write a new Philip Marlowe novel – but can he capture the hero's loneliness and the bleak glitter of LA?
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 24, 2012 11:50 AM
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Blind Man’s Bluff measures no more than 60 pages, many of which are filled with old photographs, collages and scribbled portraits. You could be forgiven for thinking this to be little more than the publisher’s gesture of appreciation to Ireland’s most unjustly under-read writer as he reaches 85th year. But you would be quite wrong.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 23, 2012 9:25 PM
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FICTION:Claire Kilroy’s broadly comic tone will add to her new novel’s appeal but her Big House and gothic motifs blur the focus...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 23, 2012 9:05 PM
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POETRY:Because Harry Clifton now allows more feeling into his work, there are some poems in his new collection that will be read as long as poems are read anywhere...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 3, 2012 8:38 PM
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Two summers ago, I went to a reading that the poet Paul Muldoon was giving in a black box theater on the third floor of a nondescript building in Hell’s Kitchen. He read from a galley of his 2010 collection of poems, Maggot, and marked copy errors with a pen as he went along. John Ashbery joined him, reading handwritten translations of Rimbaud scrawled out on a yellow legal pad. There were mice scurrying around and about 20 people in the room, who were polite and subdued.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 24, 2012 11:44 AM
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...One of the most prominent Irish transplants now dwelling in Atlantic Canada, Gerard Beirne was quick to root himself here, and foster its writing community. He’s currently teaching at UNB, where he has also been a writer in residence, and acts as an editor at one of Canada’s finest literary journals, The Fiddlehead. He also plays a big role in a fantastic organization — The Writers Federation of New Brunswick — who do as much or more for their members as any similar organization.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 3, 2012 8:33 PM
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COURSES
We offer several options for international students: Irish Theatre January Term & Irish Theatre Summer School
Original Theatre Project
Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge
Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
Storytelling: Our great tradition
The Writer’s Room
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 2, 2012 12:16 PM
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‘I need the trees to tell that other story,
the one that’s murmurous with wind and leaves.’ ‘Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing. Her late poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once.’ So wrote John McAuliffe in his Irish Times review of Selected Poems (2011), while in The North Hubert Moore enthused: ‘Read this beautiful new book and you will find yourself led along ‘Paths and smalls roads and their next bend’.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 1, 2012 9:11 PM
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– See Maeve Binchy died....
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 1, 2012 3:33 PM
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Love's Bonfire. By Tom Paulin. Faber and Faber; 52 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
TOM PAULIN, an Anglo-Irish poet and Oxford academic, is no stranger to the evocative power of words. He was born in Leeds in 1949 and grew up in Belfast. His work is attentive to the shift between these differing cultures, the pinpoints of speech that separate one from another. His poetry takes place both against the backdrop of Irish sectarian violence and in the glare of “that cold intense/English light”; his feeling of displacement between the two places described in lean, simple phrases.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 30, 2012 10:16 PM
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The Irish Literary Times provides up-to-date coverage of Irish literary news and events in a magazine format via articles available online. The site is curated by Gerard Beirne an Irish poet and novelist based in Sligo. He has published six books of poetry and fiction. His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was selected by the Literary Editor of the Daily Express as his Book of the Year “scandalously ignored by the Man Booker judges...”. His recent collection of stories was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. http://www.gerardbeirne.com
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