Loose Leaves:Dublin screenwriter Derek Landy's debut children's book Skulduggery Pleasant has become a runaway success before it's even published next Monday, with news that he's been signed up by publisher HarperCollins for a deal including two more books worth more than £1 million (€1.47 million).
Landy, who worked on the family farm for six years before meteoric success struck, can put it all down to his protagonist - Skulduggery Pleasant, a magician with a penchant for fire, who also just happens to be dead. He's got a sidekick, a 12- year-old girl called Stephanie, and both of them are hell-bent on defying evil. They're a double act we'll be hearing a lot more about, with a publicity campaign that includes MySpace and Bebo pages, a video posted on YouTube, music downloads and an online treasure hunt to lead children to the book. Not since the success of Eoin Colfer has an Irish children's author been signed up with such elan and Landy seems also to be pioneering a hard-to-define genre of comic-Gothic-horror adventure.
Given that he has turned out to be a pot of gold, we wanted to know where the wise- cracking, well dressed, urbane, skeleton detective Skulduggery came from. "He popped into my head in the summer of 2005 when I was in London in a hotel room - and I can't tell you why," says 32-year-old Landy, who's unlikely to be back harvesting celery and cauliflowers on that farm near Lusk in north Co Dublin any time soon.
It's another milestone in the increasing success story of children's literature by Irish writers, similar to that long enjoyed by popular fiction by female Irish writers. With the last Harry Potter offering coming from JK Rowling in July, children's publishers are constantly on the look-out for "the next big thing" and HarperCollins will be hoping Skulduggery may fill at least some of Harry's shoes. The way HarperCollins sees it, skulls are hot - and "only the dead really know how to live." Critic Robert Dunbar says it's a remarkable debut with wonderful dialogue. "Young girls will love Stephanie because she's so bright and quick and gives Skulduggery as good as she gets." See www.skulduggerypleasant.com
Reavey centenary symposium
It's no exaggeration to say that poet, publisher and translator George Reavey was a unique figure on the Irish literary landscape. Now the school of English at Trinity College Dublin will hold a centenary symposium in his honour next month. Born in Belarus on May 1st, 1907, he was the only child of a Polish mother and a father from Northern Ireland. An experimental poet, Reavey is seen to represent a very specific connection between the Irish literary tradition and European Modernism - which is also relevant to contemporary Irish culture. In Paris in the 1930s he founded the Europa Press, working on collaborations between poets and engravers. Writers Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Paul Éluard, and artists Picasso and Max Ernst were among those involved. Reavey, who helped bring 20th-century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience, translated the work of Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, among others. Reavey, who spent parts of his boyhood in Belfast, lived in the US in later life. He died in 1976.
Reavey's own poetry and his translations will be marked on Friday, April 27th in the Atrium at TCD when Russian poets Sergey Biryukov and Anatoly Kudryavitsky will read in Russian and renditions of some of Reavey's translations will be read by poets Gerald Dawe and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, followed by a debate on literary translation. Reavey's life and work will be assessed the following day by speakers including Terence Brown, Philip Coleman, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Sandra Andrea O'Connell and Stephen Matterson. Events are free but booking is essential. See www.tcd.ie/OWC/events.html
Icarus soars into the future
College magazines grow and multiply these days, as was evident this week at the Student Media Awards prizegiving in Dublin. Some, such as Trinity College Dublin's Icarus, have distinguished lineages. It's a special pleasure to see a former editor, Derek Mahon, gracing the pages of the latest issue (Icarus: Vol 57, Spring 07) with two poems, Tara Boulevard and Somewhere the Wave. "Yet even as Icarus connects with its past, it is moving into the future," writes editor Richard Keith in his editorial announcing the periodical's new website, on which the work of aspiring writers gets an airing. See www.icarusmag.com.