There was a certain poignancy to the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year award ceremony at the start of Listowel Writers' Week on Wednesday night. The recipient of this year's award of £5,000 was the recently deceased novelist J.M. O'Neill. Although the judges, Colm Toibin and Bruce Arnold, informed Writers' Week of their decision to nominate O'Neill's Bennett & Company for the award some weeks ago, it was decided not to announce it until this week's opening bash. So Jerry O'Neill never knew of his win.ainne in the presence of his widow, Mary O'Neill.
The other shortlisted authors were Mike McCormack, Peter Cunningham, Gretta Mulrooney and Catherine Dunne.
Bennett & Company will not, however, be the final novel that admirers of O'Neill can expect. Brandon, his Irish publisher, has another, Rellighan, Undertaker, which they hope to bring out in September when they republish two earlier out-of-print novels, Open Cut and Duffy is Dead.
The Writers' Week runs until June 6th and features, among others, Hugo Hamilton, Marsha Hunt, Fintan O'Toole, Michael Hartnett and Professor Anthony Clare.
In the run-up to 2000, everybody seems to have gone list crazy. Still, a list compiled by International Who's Who of the top 100 figures who shaped this century is an interesting reflection on Ireland's literary heritage.
Of those 100, only four are Irish and every one of them is a writer - no prizes for correctly guessing that Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats were the literary figures that made the grade. Other writers who make up 16 of the 100 movers and shapers include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
`I really knew I was in a different country when 6 o'clock came and my publicists suggested we went for a pint," said David Guterson, who cruised into town to read from his new novel, East of the Mountains, on Monday night. Nothing too unusual in the suggestion of a pint except that Guterson was due to start a reading in Dublin's Waterstones at 6 p.m.
"In America they have you sitting biting your nails for half an hour before the reading starts. I've just had a glass of Guinness and I like that much better."
It was a first trip to Ireland for Guterson, whose first novel, Snow Falling On Cedars, was a best-seller, but he confided that he already had a big file devoted to this country. No, he's not moving away from his usual literary territory, Washington State, but he had looked into the possibility of becoming a legal Irish resident: "Well, I heard writers don't pay taxes here, which sounded good to me."
Although Patrick Kavanagh is celebrated with great panache in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, on the last weekend of November every year, there has been very little in the way of celebration of his years spent in Dublin. However, a new annual event organised by the Monaghan Association in Dublin looks set to change all that when it rolls into action next Thursday.
It is called "Remembering Patrick Kavanagh", and the keynote address will be delivered by critic and author Brian Fallon. Other contributors will include Anthony Cronin, academic Una Agnew and poet and academic Gerald Dawe, with Theo Dorgan of Poetry Ireland as the chairman.
The evening will be rounded off by a reading of extracts from Kavanagh's A Little Drop of Whiskey by Inniskeen actor Gene Carroll. The event will take place in Buswell's Hotel on Molesworth Street at 8.30 p.m. Admission is free.
Patrick Kavanagh: Dublin pays homage
Despite the outrage with which the award is greeted every year, the Booker Prize is still regarded as the one that really matters, so this year's judges are to be pitied and envied in equal measure. This year's chair is Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP and author. His team of readers and fellow judges includes novelist Shena MacKay, academic and author John Sutherland, Boyd Tonkin of the Independent and journalist/author Natasha Walter.
The shortlist will be announced on September 21st and the winner will be released to the lions on October 25th.