On Tuesday evening Sadbh trotted off to Easons/Hanna's on Dublin's Dawson Street for her first book launch of 2001.The book was Dead Cat Bounce, the author, Monaghan man Damien Owens. Readers may remember that Owens was the lucky first-time author whose novel - plus a second yet to be completed - went to auction for what agent Faith O'Grady coyly described as "a six-figure sum ".
Faith herself was in the throng on Tuesday to cheer on her discovery, as was Owens's publisher, Angela Herlihy from Hodder and Stoughton, over from London for the bash. The manuscript was touted around London publishers early last year. The rights were eventually sold to Hodder, after six put in a bid, on that most auspicious of days for mutual love, Valentine's Day.
Owens read an extract at the launch about flat-hunting in Ranelagh which elicited a chorus of empathetic groans from the assembled guests. Among the scores present, Sadbh spied Eileen Owens, his Mammy. "Everyone in Monaghan is very proud of our boy," she declared.
Sadbh was fascinated to learn that Ronan Bennett has written a film script of Seamus Deane's novel Reading in the Dark with assurances from Deane over the phone that Bennett should feel free to do as he wished with the book. "I had (and have) no interest in working on, or being consulted, about a film or TV version," said Deane.
All this was in the context of Deane's views, expressed in The Guardian, of Bennett's Rebel Heart TV series which Deane feels doesn't show his fellow Northern writer at anything like his best, going so far as to call it "a costume drama with guns " with none of the directorial drive of Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins.
What to Deane is the surprising stiffness of Rebel Heart, he attributes to an absence of what Bennett was accused of having in too great abundance when the brouhaha broke out about it all in recent weeks. In short: "The series lacks political conviction of the most basic kind," said Deane, making one all the more interested to know what kind of a job Bennett did with Reading in the Dark.
Well, the category prizes for the Whitbread Book Awards have been and gone, editing out the Irish interest of poet Maurice Riordan and novelist Anne Enright in their wake. The most interesting question now is whether Wunderkind Zadie Smith, who was passed over for the Orange Prize, and also missed the Booker shortlist, deservedly hits the jackpot this time and goes on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year overall award worth £22,500.
In their citation when her novel White Teeth recently triumphed in the Whitbread's first novel category, the judges described it as "a landmark first novel." For the Whitbread Book of the Year, Smith will be up against novelist Matthew Kneale, poet John Burnside, and biographer Lorna Sage as well as the winner of the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, yet to be announced.
The ceremony takes place in London on the 23rd of this month and part of it will be broadcast on BBC 2.
Still on awards, the T.S. Eliot Prize will be awarded in London on the 22nd of this month to one of the 10 shortlisted poets: Michael Longley, John Burnside, Michael Donaghy, Anne Carson, Douglas Dunn, Roddy Lumsden, Anne Stephenson, Thom Gunn, Derek Walcott, and Alan Jenkins. Judges for the £10,000 sterling prize are Paul Muldoon, Glynn Maxwell, and Kathleen Jamie.
The Royal Irish Academy's committee for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature has put out a call for papers for a forthcoming conference. "After the Union: A Cultural Desert?" will run on April 19th and 20th, as this year marks the 200th anniversary of the Act of Union.
The keynote lecture will be delivered by Gearoid O Tuathaigh of NUI Galway, with other sessions on such topics as "After the Revolutions" and "Writings in the 1820s". The organisers are looking for papers of 20 minutes duration for either of these topics. Send abstracts to Terence Brown, Dept of English, TCD, Dublin 2, or e-mail tbrown@tcd.ie
Kilkenny VEC's Arts Education Programme has announced details of its upcoming series of Thursday lectures, which will run from the 25th of this month to March 1st, at Butler House in Kilkenny. Among the lecturers will be actor and scholar Felix Nobis giving a performance of his own translation of Beowulf, on February 15th. On March 1st, poet Rita Kelly will be reading. Entrance for all events is £4. More information from 056-65103/51847.
Sadbh