Sabh trotted down the Dublin quays on Tuesday to the Clarence Hotel, where the names of the judges for the International Impac Literary Award were being announced. With a purse of £100,000, the Impac prize is the richest literary prize in the world.
The judges this year are Alicia Borinsky, a writer and director of Latin American studies at Boston University; Suzi Feay, literary editor of the Independent on Sunday; Joysane Savigneau, cultural editor of Le Monde; David Dabydeen, writer and literature professor at Warwick University; and our own man, writer Colm Toibin. All five were present.
Like the dalmatians, there are 101 books on the long list. There are four Irish writers on the list: Sebastian Barry for The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty; Ronan Bennett for The Catastrophist; William Trevor for Death in Summer; and Colum McCann for This Side of Brightness. The shortlist will be announced in March, and the winner in May.
The Impac folk were being very coy about whether they plan on inviting the troubled Jeffrey Archer over to Dublin to speak at the awards dinner, as he has done on every other occasion to date. "Well, he might be in prison by then, so that could complicate matters," one delightfully pragmatic Impac person opined.
The poet, Macdara Woods, is more or less commuting between Irish and Italian citizenship these days, as he's spending so much time in Umbria. The reason? His latest book, Pesaro ai miei piedi, with an introduction by Paul Cahill, is going down a storm in Italy.
What makes it different is that on sale with the Italian-English language poems is a 45-minute CD with words by Woods and music by Militia, an Italian percussion band.
Apparently the words and music combination is proving very popular: a genre that is sure to become increasingly more popular over here as CDs become less expensive.
Meanwhile, the working title of Woods's next Irish collection is Nightingale Water, which should be appearing from Dedalus next autumn.
The last time Sadbh remembers the launch of a boxed set of three books, it was the Field Day anthology, which attracted much notoriety for lacking representatives of Sadbh's sex. This time round, the three books in the box focus on the male sex again, except it's the same man in the one box - Liam O'Flaherty.
Wolfhound has published the Collected Stories of O'Flaherty, all 183 of them, with an introduction by editor A. A. Kelly. Included here too are the Irish language stories, Duil, as well as 35 stories making it into book form for the first time. It's a limited edition of 1,000 copies, at £50 a set, so put in your order pronto.
Now that the long winter nights have sunk in once more, it's time to get out the butterfly net and go looking for that elusive creature, the muse. The Spotlight on Skerries people are searching for the Y2K Fingal Scribe - they want submissions for new, unperformed one-act plays by February 18th.
For a copy of the rules (essential reading), send an SAE to the Skerries Community Centre, Dublin Road, Skerries, Co Dublin. The prize is £1,000, plus a big shiny perpetual trophy to whack on top of the telly for a year.
The Association of Teachers of English (ATE), which has been around since 1964, has scored a bit of a coup by getting Britain's Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, over to open its summer school next year. Over 100 teachers are expected to converge on the Writer's Museum at Parnell Square between June 26th and 30th for a week of workshops and lectures in film, drama, poetry and the novel.
Motion will read on the opening night and then give a paper on Keats and Larkin the following day. Chairwoman Kate Bateman can neither confirm nor deny that Motion will Speak in Rhyme All the Time. Information from (01) 4531780.
The Long Room, with that book, The Book of Kells, is a dangerous place to launch any publication. Upstaging and all that, with folk peering at the monks' tome, instead of admiring the new opus.
On Thursday, in Trinity's Old Library, Declan Kiberd of UCD launched Arts and the Magic of the Word. It was a joint bun-fight between an Chomhairle Leabharlanna and the Arts Council: the report recommends the promotion of the arts through public libraries, and is available free of charge from either An Chomhairle Leabharlanna or the Arts Council.