“Novels are life or they are nothing,” Richard Flanagan said after winning the Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in 2014. I have adapted his phrase for my own use: books are life. Books educate us, entertain us, move us and, if we are lucky enough, change us forever. To have a reading life is one of the great intimate joys of the world.
Books have been good to me, too. They have changed my life since the publication of my debut memoir, The Cow Book, the story of a family farm in rural Ireland. It’s rural Ireland that shaped me, read me and changed me. Rural Ireland is our wellspring of creativity and where so much of our dream landscape comes from.
Rural Ireland is driving a new future for itself at the moment. With villages and towns taking up new ideas and new ventures from coffee culture to adventure tourism. For me, rural Ireland matters so much, and that is why I, along with a team of volunteers, have set up Ireland’s first official book town, in the heart of the midlands, in Granard, Co Longford.
What’s a book town? It’s a small town dedicated to books, literature and the arts. The model exists worldwide, with international book towns as far away as Australia and South Africa and as nearby as Scotland, Wales and England. Book towns are where rural towns especially have taken books to their hearts and, in doing so, helped to attract people and commerce.
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Granard Booktown Festival is the first part of the journey to make Granard a book town. The project came about after a visit to Wigtown, the national book town of Scotland, in 2018 with my memoir. There I heard about book towns for the first time and saw what Wigtown had become in the 25 years since it first embraced books. Before then the town had been suffering from rural decay, but now the place is full of books and bookshops, with literary tourists and much more. Every season there is something to look forward to in Wigtown, with festivals throughout the year.
Wigtown was our template, but there’s another town that was an inspiration, too: Dingle. I love its streets, its views, its people and its cultural output, particularly the renowned Other Voices festival. Its decision to embrace the future is an inspiration: we want to create a Dingle of the midlands, where there’s always something cultural happening. We want to the midlands to be a place for art, music and, of course, our beloved writers.
Setting up Ireland’s first official book town has been a labour of love for our dedicated organising committee, all voluntary, all driven by passion, and all wanting to do their bit for rural Ireland, our home. We have spent the past year and a half working to build an international literary festival where new ideas can take all shapes and sizes.
We quickly assembled a team of experienced volunteers, from writer Belinda McKeon to local politicians and the accessibility campaigner James Cawley jnr. It’s been a real community effort – and we’ve also drawn people from all over the country and the world to help us. Our patrons include the Emmy-nominated journalist Shaunagh Connaire, of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, RTÉ broadcaster Rick O’Shea, founder of Ireland’s biggest book club, with its 40,000 members; and Richard Flanagan, the writer I quoted at the start of this piece. Born in Longford, Tasmania, he is our long-lost brother, and he saw the value in what we were trying to do immediately. Right at the start of the process he told me he could see the “transformative power of small places dreaming themselves anew”. It is our great honour to have him as one of our founding patrons.
From the outset we all agreed that we wanted to bring writers to Granard from all over the world. Securing the best-selling climate-change expert Prof Tim Flannery was a sign of our intent. Booking Irish heavyweights such as Donal Ryan and Sinéad Burke changed everything and let us know we were on the right path. We’re delighted that we’ll also be joined by, among others, David and Adam King, of Late Late Toy Show fame; Sally Hayden, the Irish Times contributor who won the An Post Irish Book of the Year award in 2022 for My Fourth Time, We Drowned; Adrian Duncan; and Manchán Magan – all of them engaging, all of them writers whom audiences will cherish. We are so thankful to the community, the county council and the arts bodies and individuals who have taken a punt on us and our idea.
Becoming the Dingle of the midlands is getting one step closer as we approach our first festival this weekend. We’ve got the writers, we’ve got the town and, with trad music sessions planned each evening in the beautiful local pubs, we’ve got a weekend on the cards that will be a grand celebration of rural Ireland and the small town that embraced books as part of its shared future.
John Connell is one of the founders and directors of Granard Booktown Festival, which runs from Friday, April 21st, to Sunday, April 23rd
