Sheila Pratschke's background was uniquely suited to her appointment as director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais at the beginning of this year. Née Killeen in Limerick, she studied Irish and French at UCD.
In 1994, she did six months' preparatory work for the Imaginaire Irlandais festival that took place in Paris two years later. She became director of the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, then ran the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artists' retreat, at Annaghmakerrig, an old Victorian House on a lake in Co Monaghan.
This autumn's programme is the first devised by Pratschke, and her years at Annaghmakerrig have imbued it with a strong literary flavour. "In the sense of doing more than is expected of us, it's in literature that we've hit it time and again," she says. "It must be in the DNA. We love words." Joseph O'Connor read from Redemption Falls on August 30th. Colum McCann will read from his new novel Zoli, about a gypsy woman who is exiled for betraying her people, on September 20th. That is the eve of an intensely Irish weekend in Paris, to include the Taoiseach's meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy, the France-Ireland rugby match, the Taoiseach's inauguration of the restored Irish College library, and the Ireland Fund Dinner.
To mark the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Centre Culturel, Pratschke has invited five Irish women writers to work together for one week, then present the result on October 19th. "It's kind of 'put five women together and stir'," she jokes. The five are Jennifer Johnston, Mary O'Malley, Anne Haverty, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Gina Moxley.
On November 27th, Colm Tóibín, who won the Booker Prize for The Master, based on the life of Henry James, will deliver the first annual Ireland Fund lecture at the Centre Culturel.
One of Pratschke's projects for 2008 is a conference on exile and identity, in keeping with the Irish experience of diaspora that started with the Flight of the Earls and the later departure of the Wild Geese. "Exile has been good for writers," she says. "That agonising about being out and still in is the food of the human condition." Contemporary Irish culture, Pratschke says: "is where a lot of people think it's not. There's a lot of brave and experimental testing work being undertaking. A lot of artists live on the edge of survival to take risks. That isn't necessarily coming through."
She believes her duty as director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais is to provide a mix of "populist and contemporary cutting edge" culture, "to try and bring that to people - what is being tested. Because we are a state in such flux and imbalance, this is what is important about us now." Pratschke (above) sees herself as "an ordinary woman . . . If I don't get it immediately, or if I say, 'that's a bit tedious', I try to see it as a sign that I should be aware and look more carefully. It may be no good, but you have to give it a chance.
"This applies to painting, writing, new media. The important thing is to cultivate openness. What is good, exciting or interesting will eventually emerge."
For further information see www.centreculturelirlandais.com
