A literary roundup
Poetry festival line-up
Readings by poets Derek Mahon and Anne Stevenson (pictured below) are part of the 15th Dun Laoghaire Rathdown International Poetry Festival which runs from 25th-28th March at the Pavilion Theatre. Mahon’s collection Life on Earth won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award at last year’s festival. Stevenson, who was dubbed “a contemporary Emily Dickinson, a poet who works on a small canvas quietly, with big themes’’, by Jay Parini, is the author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently Stone Milk (2007) which she said was her final book. Born in 1933 in England, she grew up in the US, settling in Britain in 1964. She is also a literary critic and biographer, and author of two books on Elizabeth Bishop and a biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame.
In his keynote address Paul Muldoon will consider poems by six Irish poets including Sunday Morning by Louis MacNeice and Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master. And there will be a reading by this year’s TS Eliot Award winner, Philip Gross. The 40th anniversary of poetry publishing house The Gallery Press will be celebrated on Saturday March 27th at 3.30pm, at which Gallery poets will read while the press’s founder and editor, poet Peter Fallon, will be interviewed by festival curator Belinda McKeon. Poets from various countries will read at the festival alongside an Irish line-up that includes Justin Quinn, Vona Groarke and John F Deane. This year’s Irish Times Poetry Now Award winner will also be announced at the festival.
poetrynow.ie, booking: 01-231 2929 or paviliontheatre.ie
Critical moment
Critics discussing the value of what they do is on the agenda at The Good of Criticism: The Value of Literary Studies, a conference in the University of Reading from March 19th-20th. One of the organisers is Irish academic Ronan McDonald, author of The Death of the Critic in which he defends the role of the public critic. Other speakers include Stefan Collini, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Edna Longley. The aim is to explore the “good’’ of literary studies in a broad sense. The explosion of user-generated cultural criticism in the blogosphere is, they say, one of the reasons for addressing the function of criticism today. “As it enters a new era, English is under pressure to justify itself to public funding bodies. This pressure comes when the standing of the ‘critic’, both academic and journalist, is increasingly queried.’’ The debate will continue via an internet forum. The event is in the college’s English and American Literature Department where McDonald teaches – although not for long because in April he takes up a chair in modern Irish Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney where he’ll also be director of the new John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies.
reading.ac.uk/english/aboutus/ deal-literaryconference2010
Literary prize for Bardwell
Novelist and short story writer Leland Bardwell has received the first Dede Korkut Literary Award of the Turkish PEN Centre, a prize designed to build bridges between languages, encourage studies on comparative literature and foster literary translations. When accepting it, Bardwell spoke of how the Irish are determined to get their message over as quickly as possible for which the short story medium is so suited.
“We have produced some of the most phenomenal short-story writers over the last 200 years. Writers who tell it well and tell it fast.... I am very honoured to be given a ringside seat at the circus amongst this company.”
pen.org.tr/en
