A public discussion on “surviving redundancy” is just of one the headline events at this year’s Dublin Book Festival.
Despite the cuts in funding for the arts, the event in the capital's City Hall from March 6th to 8th will be free again.
It features more than 100 writers and journalists at over 50 readings, debates, interviews and events for children, and it’s hoped that last year’s attendance record of 11,000-plus will be broken.
Authors Nell McCaferty, Gordon Snell, Thomas Kilroy, Mary Kenny and Eileen Battersby will be interviewed by fellow authors, while poets Theo Dorgan, Geraldine Mills, Pól Ó Muirí, Paddy Bushe, and Rosita Boland will be reading from their work.
Public discussions are a major part of this now annual festival. A sign of the times this year is one called Surviving Redundancy, featuring Lisa O'Callaghan, Andrew McCann and Frank Scott-Lennon. Others include Rewriting Ireland's Rebel History , with Diarmaid Ferriter, Ruan O'Donnell and Niamh O'Sullivan; Critiquing the Critics – the Art of Literary Reviewing, with Carlo Gébler, Greg Baxter and Siobhán Parkinson; and Celebrating 100 Years of Irish-Language Novels , with Máirín Nic Eoin, Brian Ó Conchubhair and Sorcha de Brún.
Mary Kenny, Thomas Kilroy and Gordon Snell are among the interviewees in separate "In Conversation" slots, as is Irish Times Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersby. The author of Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty , published recently, she will be talking to Declan Meade of the Stinging Fly , and she'll also take part, with Sergio Marras, in a tribute to late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño .
Shane Hegarty, another Irish Times journalist and author of The Irish (and Other Foreigners) will speak at an event followed, appropriately, by Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland, a discussion with Hugo Hamilton, Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó, and readings by Enrique Juncosa, Anatoly Kudryavitsky and others.
As the festival ends on International Women's Day, women will be a strong presence on its final day. A posthumous book from Nuala Ó Faolain, A More Complex Truth: Selected Writings , is to be launched, while The Legacies of Feminism will be debated by Susan McKay, Ivana Bacik, Caitríona Crowe and Margaret MacCurtain, chaired by Anthea McTeirnan. Full details at dublinbookfestival.com.