A trio of Irish writers whose work suggests that crime can pay, several major international poets and novelists, and a jazz-based celebration of the Beat Generation will feature at this year's Dublin Writers' Festival.
Launched in Dublin yesterday, the festival, now in its fourth year, will run from Thursday, June 13th until the evening of that Dublin literary date of dates, Bloomsday.
Taking part in the festival gala reading will be the newly crowned winner of the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the French writer Michel Houellebecq.
But before that, a busy festival programme, aiming to place literature within an arts context with a strong emphasis on poetry, will open with a reading featuring one of the world's leading poets, the Australian Les Murray, whose collections include The Daylight Moon, Dog Fox Field and the verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral.
He has been described as Australia's natural spokesman and his country lives and breathes through his work. Often clever and frequently amusing, almost conversational at times, Murray, who will also conduct a poetry master class, possesses energy as well as a feel for the subtle nuances of language, mood and tone.
Sharing the platform is Richard Murphy whose Collected Poems were published by Gallery last year, and whose atmospheric memoir The Kick is an account of the making of a poet.
Accomplished crime writers Peter Cunningham, Ken Bruen and Paul Williams will participate in Criminal Inventions, a joint reading and panel discussion on the art of crime writing - not crime. Another genre with a strong festival presence is children's literature, and Michael Morpurgo, author of Wombat Goes Walkabout, The Dancing Bear and the elegiac castaway adventure tale Kensuke's Kingdom, will attract a large gathering of younger readers, as will Steve May, whose children's books include Dazzer Plays On and Keeping the Faith.
Also participating is the South African novelist and poet Christopher Hope.
A former Whitbread Prize winner for Kruger's Alp, he is a persuasive, intelligent writer whose fiction is as engaging as his commentary - filtered through memoirs such as White Boy Running and Signs of the Heart - is enlightened.
The French writer Agnes Desarthe, who impressed critics with the ironic candour of Good Intentions (which neatly pitches political correctness on its head) will also participate, and German film-maker and writer Doris Dörrie will introduce her film, Enlightenment Guaranteed. Nordic Voices will be an important session featuring writers from Scandinavia.
Shrewd programming brings the Chicago-born US writer Larry Heinemann to Dublin. Inducted into the US army in 1966 he served in Vietnam as a combat infantry man.
His first novel, Close Quarters (1977), the story of Philip Dosier who finds himself fighting in a war he knows nothing about, has a terrifying power. Written with vicious lyricism, it is a classic war story as is its successor, Paco's Story, winner of the 1987 National Book Award.
Should you have to balance on one toe throughout, this could be the event of the festival. Heinemann will also conduct a prose master class.