It WAS the Scriobh literary festival that first brought writer Eoin MacNamee to Sligo. Now, eight years later, he will be giving the opening reading at this year's festival next Thursday.
Originally from Kilkeel, Co Down, the author of Resurrection Man and The Blue Tango has high praise for the organisers for Scriobh.
"People like Leland Bardwell and Dermot Healy have always been involved and they have their ear to the ground on what is going on in world literature and they are able to reflect that," he says.
He will be reading from The Blue Tango, a work based on the unsolved murder of Patricia Curran in Belfast in 1952. Patricia, was the daughter of a judge, who was stabbed 37 times. A man wrongly convicted of the crime recently had his conviction quashed. Certain actions by her family have never been explained.
"It is about more than Patricia Curran, it is about society itself which was inherently corrupt," he says. He describes the time as "the heyday of unionist self-rule".
A seaside area in south Sligo is now home for MacNamee and his family. As regards being a Northerner, he finds attitudes "more open" on the west coast and says he believes it is probably an urban/rural divide.
He has managed to find some similarities between Kilkeel and Sligo. "Where I was brought up we had the Mourne Mountains behind us and the sea in front of us. Now we have the Ox Mountains and the Atlantic - we're just facing a different direction."
Others taking part include Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes; French writer Charles Dantzig; Russian poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky; Australian biographer Susanna de Vries and Irish writers Pat McCabe, Rita Ann Higgins and Ann Marie Hourihane.
The festival runs from September 13-16th in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery. Information from 07141405.