Irish Booker hopes rest on debutantGiven the paucity of Irish titles on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction, announced last week, the inclusion of Gerard Donovan for Schopenhauer's Telescope is good news on a number of fronts.
There's the excitement of his inclusion for a début novel, but there's also the fact that were he not on the 23-book list, Ireland wouldn't be represented at all. Donovan, a thrice-published poet, now jockeys with such giants as Margaret Atwood (Oryz and Crake) and J. M. Coetzee (the yet-to-be-published Elizabeth Costello) for the £50,000 purse and, far more importantly, for what is the most prestigious prize for a work in English on this side of the Atlantic.
Reviewing Schopenhauer's Telescope on these pages last spring Derek Hand found it refreshing - in a world full of post-modern ironic indifference - that Donovan had something to say and wasn't merely content to amuse. "At a time when the world seems more violent than ever, when history becomes a utilitarian tool to justify any position one could care to imagine, a novel that focuses on the dilemma of the individual response to these concerns is a novel to be read," wrote Hand, who was struck, too, by the way Donovan brought a poet's sensibility to language to his first foray into fiction.
Colum McCann's Dancer, based on the life of Rudolf Nureyev; Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, and the forthcoming Lost Souls by the former Booker-shortlisted Michael Collins are among the Irish titles omitted from this year's race, which will go into frenzied gear on September 16th with the announcement of the shortlist. A few books on the longlist aren't even published yet, leaving their authors stranded in the limelight before they appear, the worst such victim this year being the previously Booker-snubbed Martin Amis, whose much-embargoed Yellow Dog - his first novel in eight years - is being dismissed before its publication date on September 4th.
Graham Swift's The Light of Day; Jonathan Raban's Waxwings (reviewed on Weekend 11), and new girl on the block Monica Ali's Brick Lane (which became a must-read this summer after its rave reception on publication) are strong contenders on a list which also includes: Carol Birch (Turn Again Home), Melvyn Bragg (Crossing the Lines), Julia Darling (The Taxi Driver's Daughter), Damon Galgut (The Good Doctor), Barbara Gowdy (The Romantic), Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), Zoë Heller (Notes on a Scandal), Francis King (The Nick of Time), Shena Mackay (Heligoland), Clare Morrall (Astonishing Splashes of Colour), John Murray (Jazz etc), Julie Myerson (Something Might Happen), Tim Parks (Judge Savage), Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore), D.B.C. Pierre (Vernon God Little) and Barbara Trapido (Frankie and Stankie).
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Leg-up for poetic endeavours
Judges Charles Simic and Matthew Sweeney were unanimous in their decision when it came to picking this year's winner of the €6,500 Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition. It's been won by a relatively unknown Irish poet, Colette Olney, from Bandon, Co Cork, whose entry, 'The Nun's Garden', was described by Simic as poetry at its finest. Olney, who described her win as "a great leg-up for me and my endeavours", said the poem evolved from her walks through a place like the one she describes evocatively within it:
I cannot go in the nuns' garden without allowing them/
their say. They tell me God is here; while they lie,/
lined up, marked by small crosses, behind the tangled/
loganberry brambles and tilting forsythia; neat/
with their sisters, listening to the others moving quietly/
at window catch and gate latch . . .
This year both the second and third prizes went to the US. Reid Bush won €2,500 for 'Aide's Report', while Elisabeth Murawski won €1,250 for 'Lullaby of the Train'. The winner of the Emerging Irish Poet prize was Leanne O'Sullivan for 'The Prayer'.
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The Crotty revival
Raymond Crotty, who died in 1994 and is best remembered for his successful constitutional action in 1987 against the ratification of the Single European Act by simple majority vote in the Dáil, rather than by referendum, is commemorated in Dublin this weekend at the 15th Desmond Greaves Summer School in the Irish Labour History Museum, Beggars Bush Barracks, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. The school meets annually to commemorate Greaves, the legendary labour historian and editor of the Irish Democrat. Analysis of Crotty's legacy began last night and continues at 2.30 p.m. today with a forum chaired by Peadar Kirby and addressed by Prof Joe Lee. Crotty was chosen as a subject partly because the international attention his unusual theory about the origins of capitalism is getting since the posthumous publication of the book he completed just before he died, When Histories Collide: the Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism.