Bookers lost and found:It's got a catchy ring to it: The Lost Man Booker Prize, of which the winner will be announced in May. Sadly, half of the 22 writers on the longlist – a clutch of whom are Irish or have Irish associations – are dead but winning a Booker prize of any kind is still a nice feather in a writer's cap, alive or dead.
This is a one-off prize to honour books published in 1970 that missed out on the chance to win a Booker. In 1971 the prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became, as it is now, an award for the best novel in the year of publication. Simultaneously, the date on which the award was given moved from April to November. The result was a whole year’s gap when a wealth of fiction, published in 1970, fell through the net. Forty years later a panel of judges born in or around 1970 will select a shortlist of six novels from a longlist of books that would otherwise have been eligible and which includes such giants as H.E Bates, Nina Bawden, Shirley Hazzard and Patrick White.
The Irish novelist Christy Brown is on board for Down All The Daysas is JG Farrell for Troubles. Born in England, he grew up in Ireland and was living here at the time of his early death by drowning off the coast of Cork. Also on the list are Dublin-born Iris Murdoch with A Fairly Honourable Defeatand Patrick OBrian, who died here, with Master and Commander.
Farrell did go on to win the prize in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, and Murdoch won in 1978 with The Sea, The Sea. Paddy Power has installed Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeatas its 3/1 favourite to win this time.
The Man Booker Prize is good at creating spin-off awards; there was the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008. Readers are the real winners, as the race for these celebratory gongs kickstarts a revival of interest in the featured books – and the titles on the Lost Man Booker longlist are still generally available.
The shortlist will be announced in March, and the public will decide the winner via the Man Booker Prize website. See themanbookerprize.com or twitter.com/ManBookerPrize
A real Munster match
An assembly of Irish writers, mostly poets, who have written evocatively about place will form the core of the Cork Spring Literary Festival organised by the Munster Literature Centre with the theme Dinnsheanchas: The Lore of Place, which runs from Feb 17-20. The line-up includes Michael Coady, Louis De Paor, Theo Dorgan, Derek Mahon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, Gerard Smyth, Bernard O’Donoghue, Desmond O’Grady and Billy Ramsell. And from the US come Adam Johnson and Martín Espada. Short-story writer and novelist Johnson, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, will give a fiction workshop called Place in Fiction, including a lecture on the use of landscape in fiction and an exercise on how to create better settings for short stories. There are eight places on this course, which costs €30. Poet, editor, essayist, translator and creative writing teacher Espada’s poetry masterclass has already sold out. See munsterlit.ie
Writers in the round
Siobhán Campbell, Michael Casey, Colette Connor, Roderick Ford, Paddy Glavin, Iggy McGovern, Alison Maxwell, Clair Ní Aonghusa, Jean OBrien, Clairr OConnor, John ODonnell and Sheila OHagan are the line-up for a special event, Nights at the Round Table, by the Stephens Green Writers Group to raise funds for the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin on Wednesday Feb 17th at 7.30pm. The catchy title emanates from the table around which members discuss each others writing on a regular basis.
