In The Irish Times this Saturday, Michael Griffin remembers Oliver Goldsmith, one of Ireland’s great writers, 250 years after his death. Patrick Radden Keefe talks to Gerry Moriarty about the Disney+ series based on his bestseller Say Nothing about the abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville during the Troubles. Malcolm Sen explores how Irish writers are putting the climate crisis font and centre in their fiction. And there is a Q&A with Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts, Penance and She’s Always Hungry.
Reviews are Eoin Ó Broin on Running From Office: Confessions of Ambition and Failure in Politics by Eoghan Murphy; Daniel Geary on The Myth of American Idealism by Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky and America’s Fatal Leap: 1991-2016 by Paul W Schroeder; Theo Dorgan on This Boy’s Heart by John Creedon; Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff on the best new crime fiction; Houman Barekat on Shattered by Hanif Kureishi; and Sarah Gilmartin on Gliff by Ali Smith.
This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is the “beautifully crafted” historical thriller Where They Lie by Claire Coughlan, just €5.99, a €6 saving.
Luke Morgan has been awarded this year’s Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies, University of St. Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota. He joins Eavan Boland, Dennis O’Driscoll, Gerry Smith, Dermot Bolger, Paula Meehan, Tom McCarthy in receiving the award that is granted each year to a poet resident in Ireland.
Morgan was born in Ireland in 1994 and lives in Galway. His debut poetry collection, Honest Walls, was published in 2016 by Arlen House, followed by Beast in 2022. He was a winner of the inaugural Poetry Ireland/Trócaire competition.
Morgan’s third collection, Blood Atlas, will be published next spring in conjunction with the 29th annual Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award at the University of St. Thomas.
Morgan is also part of an award-winning Irish filmmaker duo, Morgan Brothers, with his brother, the composer Jake Morgan. Their latest film, The Boat, was filmed entirely on location in Nepal. The brothers’ films have won awards at the Dublin International Film Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Foyle Film Festival, Worcester Film Festival, and the PLANOS Film Festival.
Former Irish Times journalist Caroline Madden’s debut novel The Marriage Vendetta has sold at auction in the US to HarperCollins and in a pre-empt to Eriu/Bonnier in Ireland and Britain.
A loose modern retelling of the doomed relationship between the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his talented wife Eliza, The Marriage Vendetta will be published next April in Ireland and next June in the US.
Joseph O’Connor has described it as “a wonderfully edgy and exquisitely funny debut from a writer who is here to stay”, while Sinead Crowley said: “Laced with social commentary, humour and even a dash of magic, The Marriage Vendetta is a smart yet tender look at all of the vagaries of the modern relationship.” Alan Glynn said: “A sort of dark modern Irish fairy tale with the occasional feel of an acerbic Restoration comedy, Caroline Madden’s The Marriage Vendetta is highly entertaining and compulsively readable.”
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The Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, is seeking submissions to The 2024 John McGahern Annual Book Prize, which it set up, with the approval of McGahern’s literary estate, in 2019. The prize of £5,000 will be awarded to the best debut work of fiction – either novel or collection of short stories – by an Irish writer, or writer resident in Ireland for more than five years, published in a given year.
A condition of the prize is that the winner must be available to attend a reading and book signing as part of the Liverpool Literary Festival, due to be held in early October 2025. Travel costs (to the value of £150) and overnight accommodation will be covered for the winner. The deadline is December 6th. All submissions should also be accompanied by a submission form which can be downloaded here.
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Fallada Films has secured the rights to the memoir Girl with Two Fingers which details Irish author Nicola Rose O’Hara’s experiences as the subject of eight portraits by artist Lucian Freud, recognised as one of the foremost figurative artists of the 20th century.
Two portraits of O’Hara are currently on show at the entrance of the UBS Art Gallery, New York. Written from daily diaries and letters, the book offers an intimate look into the relationship between the model and the painter, highlighting the emotional and psychological complexities involved. Fallada’s other projects include a TV series adapted from the late British poet laureate John Betjeman’s biography on his three years as press attaché in wartime Dublin.
Producer and scriptwriter John Ingram said: “We are incredibly excited to bring Girl With Two Fingers to life as a feature film. Nicky sat for so many portraits by Freud, and spent a great deal of time with him. They became close, Freud even calling her a ‘soul companion’. We want to maintain the integrity of the written work while creating an emotionally impactful and memorable film. The film will highlight the tension between a subject’s own sense of self and identity, while all the time under the intense scrutiny of ‘the male gaze’.”
“I’m thrilled Fallada’s bringing Girl with Two Fingers to the screen,” said London-based O’Hara. “John’s profound understanding and energy will make for a great film. Of the three offers made, this was by far the most dynamic and exciting, and the one most true to the spirit of the book.”
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Dr Conor Daly will give a lecture on Monday, November 6th, at 6pm, in Room 3074, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin, on Hubert Butler: An Irish Essayist in the Soviet Union (1931).
The talk will consider impressions of life in the USSR a few years after the Russian revolution as recorded by essayist Hubert Butler, who worked as a volunteer brigade member teaching English at Leningrad’s Techmass in 1931. The talk will provide glimpses into the Butler archive at TCD, as well as extracts from Butler’s essays on life in Leningrad in the 1930s: Butler’s take on the streetscape, foreign currency stores, collective farms, mass parades, Soviet literary trends and prospects for world socialism. Butler revisited Leningrad in 1956 to see how many of his old friends had survived the purges that followed Kirov’s murder in 1934.
