Loose Leaves:There was an interesting contingent of gunmen's children in the round hall of the Four Courts in Dublin on Monday night, but there was no trouble at all. In fact, the mood was celebratory as John Bowman launched "No Surrender Here!": The Civil War Papers of Ernie O'Malley 1922-1924 edited by his son Cormac KH O'Malley and Trinity College Dublin historian Anne Dolan, and published by The Lilliput Press.
"Ernie is very lucky in his son Cormac. He's been such a champion of his memory and so assiduous in collecting historic documents and getting them into the right archives and then into print," said Bowman, stressing the importance of getting to the original documents if we're to understand history.
Dolan wasn't alone when she said she'd been surprised the book was being launched in the Four Courts, the place most obviously associated with the beginning of Civil War and with all that that kind of war brought with it. "It is also the place that links Ernie O'Malley, whatever your point of view, to the destruction of the records of this country for over 700 years. It would be fair to say that we have very generous and forgiving hosts."
It had, said Dolan, been a difficult book to put together as Ernie O'Malley was a difficult man to like, a difficult man to understand. "There are many examples in the book of what seem to be unreasonable demands. He writes regularly, asking men to send him typewritten reports on foolscap paper when they are scavenging for supplies, some with holes in their boots, and little clear sense of what they are fighting for. This is not the stylised account of war and republicanism that O'Malley's memoirs recount. These letters and memos will disappoint if you expect to find that here. This is a much more complex and dispiriting account." She hoped the book would contribute to making the Civil War and many of the men involved in it seem far more complex and problematic than they have been allowed to be until now.
Fellowship for Morrissey
Northern Ireland poet Sinéad Morrissey, has been awarded a fellowship worth $75,000 (€51,300) from the US Lannan Foundation. Currently lecturer in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast, Morrissey is the author of the collections There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005).
The fellowship was announced earlier this month at the Lannan Foundation's 19th annual literary awards and fellowship ceremony in New Mexico. The foundation recognises writers for their contribution to English literature, and for excellence in poetry. Candidates for fellowships are recommended by a network of poets, writers, literary scholars, publishers, and editors, who are anonymous and geographically dispersed. Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon are previous winners. www.lannan.org
Mapping our colonial history
Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530-1750, by academic William J Smyth, this week won the €5,000 Irish Historical Research Prize for 2007.The book was published last year by Cork University Press. The award was presented by NUI Chancellor Dr Garret FitzGerald in Dublin's Croke Park where, in another life, Smyth played hurling for Tipperary at All Ireland level in the 1960s. The prize is awarded by NUI biennially for the best work of historical research published in the past three years by an NUI scholar.
Recommending Smyth, who has been professor of geography at UCC since 1977, the selection panel said the book represented the culmination of a lifetime's scholarly research and reflection. "Its core subject - the impact of the Cromwellian confiscation on pre-existing Irish society and tested against a sequence of case studies - is big; the range of material examined is extraordinarily extensive; the construction of maps, diagrams and charts to sustain the case being made is awe-inspiring."
Keegan wins Leonard bursary
Short story writer Claire Keegan is the inaugural recipient of the €10,000 Hugh Leonard Writer's Bursary. The bursary, launched this year by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, marks the special relationship between Hugh Leonard and his home-place of Dalkey and his contribution to theatre, TV and film in Ireland and abroad. It is an award for a mid-career writer. Keegan is the author of two short story collections, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields, published last May. She lives and works in Wexford.
