Compiled by
CAROLINE WALSH
Flynn in the running for TS Eliot Prize for Poetry
Irish poet Leontia Flynn is up for this year's £15,000 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, run by the Poetry Book Society. Her book Profit and Lossautomatically goes on to the shortlist as one of the four books named as a society choice collection this year. Two of the other collections shortlisted in this way are Night by David Harsent and November by Sean O'Brien. The fourth collection to be a choice for 2011 won't be announced until August. The Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll joins Gillian Clarke and Stephen Knight on the judging panel. They'll meet in October to decide the rest of the 10-book shortlist; each of the poets receives £1,000.
Lasting Irish legacy of Kader Asmal
Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton will have spoken for many people when she described former African National Congress minister Kader Asmal, who died in South Africa on Wednesday, as a mentor and friend to a generation of Irish people, including her. Coincidentally, the towering role he played in Irish public life during his decades of exile from South Africa in Ireland is explored in University of Limerick academic Tom Lodge's book Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences, published last month by Oxford University Press. Writing about the foundation of the Irish Anti Apartheid Movement in the 1960s and its committee meetings at the home of Kader and Louise Asmal, Lodge says: "The movement's success in attracting public support was largely a consequence of Kader Asmal's own energy and commitment as well as his growing professional distinction," adding that his sociability also helped ensure the movement's membership crossed all party lines, from left to right. Writing about Asmal's contribution to the ANC's acceptance of a liberal constitutionalism when he returned to South Africa at the end of apartheid, Lodge links this contribution to his Irish years. "In his second career as a South African politician, Asmal continued to be influenced by his Irish experience, citing Irish constitutional legal precedents and the experience of rural electrification in the 1920s as sources of inspiration." Certainly it was that eternally hopeful side of Asmal that shone through when we last met, at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, outside Cape Town, last year. His delight that a small contingent of Irish journalists was there was infectious. Replying to questions from the press about the turmoil that lingers in postapartheid South Africa, he answered, instantly and instinctively, with words from Yeats's The Second Coming, turning the poet's line on its head to declare: "The centre is holding here, that's the important thing. There is no political violence."
Celebration of the poetry of James Liddy
The late poet James Liddy will be remembered at the Irish Writers' Centre, in Dublin, on Tuesday at 7pm. By the time he died, in 2008, Liddy had more than half a century's writing career behind him, from which poet John Redmond has now put together Selected Poems, published by Arlen House, which is collaborating in Tuesday's celebration. Writing about Liddy on these pages the year before his death, reviewing Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy,edited by Michael S Begnal, David Gardiner remarked on how Liddy had remained one of the most prolific Irish writers since appearing on the scene in 1962 with Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink(Dolmen Press) and through the literary magazine Arena (1963-65) he published with Michael Hartnett and Liam O'Connor. "Like his tireless efforts on behalf of his peers and younger writers, James Liddy's work doesn't pay much attention to what's cool. He has paid attention to what's important to poetry – to the life of the word," he wrote.