The judges for the 1998 Irish Times-ESB Theatre Awards are Tony O Dalaigh, director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Anne Enright, author and critic, and poet Micheal O'Siadhail. This is the second year of the awards and the nominees for 1997 were announced in The Irish Times on January 10th.
The winners in the 11 categories - Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best New Play, Best Theatre Company and Best Set, Costume and Lighting Designers and Judges' Special Award - as well as the name of the recipient of the Irish Theatre Awards Special Tribute - will be announced at a special night celebrating A Year in Irish Theatre at the RDS, Dublin, next Sunday night.
Anne Enright is currently Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (from where she graduated, with a first, in 1985). She is the author of two books, The Portable Virgin and The Wig My Father Wore, and recently participated in the "group novel" Finbar's Hotel. Her work has been widely anthologised, her books translated into German and French, and she won the Rooney prize for Irish Literature in 1991. Her screenplay Revenge was broadcast by RTE, for which she worked as a producer/director, principally on the innovative Nighthawks. In the dim past she tried working as an actress and has written, more recently, for Dublin Youth Theatre. She is a frequent broadcaster and theatre critic for BBC's Radio 3 and Radio 4, and also lectures in the MSc in Multimedia Studies at TCD.
Tony O Dalaigh has been director of Dublin Theatre Festival since 1990 and has been involved in arts administration for more than 30 years. Formerly a civil servant, he was private secretary to four Ministers of Education and was granted leave of absence on a number of occasions to work as administrator to various arts organisations. He was director of An Damer, a theatre specialising in Irish language drama, from 1963 to 1965. He was the first chief executive of Irish Theatre Company, set up by the government in 1974 to tour the provinces. He was director of the National Centre for the Arts (housed in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham) from 1986 to 1990 when he retired from the civil service. He is a member of the board of the Gate Theatre and a shareholder of the National Theatre Society (Abbey Theatre).
Michael O'Siadhail is a poet. Among his collections of poetry are Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected (Bloodaxe Books, 1992) and A Fragile City (Bloodaxe Books, 1995). A new volume Our Double Time is due from Bloodaxe in April 1998. He has read and broadcast his poetry widely in Ireland, Britain, Europe and North America. Awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1981, he has been a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1988-93), of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989-97), and the Board of The Dublin International Writers Festival. He is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He is a member of Aosdana and is the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange).
