LooseLeaves:A Co Galway writer, Ronan Doyle, has won the first Stinging Fly Prize for his story The Complicated Architect. Writer Colum McCann, who judged the award, said the story was "an interesting twist in psychological fiction - calm, controlled, but with a madness at its core, as if Colm Tóibín had met Patrick McCabe and they'd conspired to create a story together in, of all places, Japan."
The new annual award is offered by The Stinging Fly magazine in association with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Thirty writers whose poetry or fiction had appeared in the journal this year were eligible for the accolade, which is only open to writers who have yet to publish a book.
This is Doyle's second published short story. Born in 1977, he has a BA in English and an MA in journalism. Having lived in Japan for two years, he now teaches English in Dublin as well as writing fiction. He wins €1,000 and a residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.
Bookshop as shrine
Veteran English publisher Anthony Cheetham - former chief executive of Random Century and Orion and now at the helm of Quercus, his new publishing venture - is so driven to despair at the avalanche of celebrity autobiographies and misery memoirs flooding bookshops for Christmas that he has come up with a rationale for the prevalence of the new genres: their pedigree stretches back to the Dark Ages. Writing in The Bookseller last week, he says that as Christmas approaches, the bookshop now becomes the shrine where we worship celebrity in much the same way our ancestors venerated the relics and lives of the saints.
"Instead of a fragment of the femur of St Cuthbert or the toenails of St Stephen, you can acquire - possibly with a third relic thrown in for free - the autobiographical life story of your most admired footballer or chat-show host. Misery memoirs? These are simply the lives of the martyrs, the archetypal victims of abuse."
But while in the past such figures faced fates such as immolation, these days they tend to live to tell the tale.
Taken individually some of these books undoubtedly stand on their own merits. The problem is the huge horde of them now out there on the market. In some quarters of the book trade, biography/misery are even occasionally conjoined in an unhappy coupling. Too much misery and the reading public might just drown in it.
Writing in residence
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (below) and Jack Harte are the inaugural occupiers of the newly opened Irish and English language writers studios in Dublin's Irish Writers' Centre on Parnell Square. Both will be available to provide advice for aspiring writers as part of their residencies, and already the centre is inviting applications from both emerging and established writers interested in the studios during 2007. Application details are available from the Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1, or e-mail info@writerscentre.ie
Poets fly close to the sun
"This is a very good time for poetry, a time in which a range of new media and technologies will not only usefully challenge poets and poetry itself, but will offer all sorts of new, as yet unguessed at, possibilities" - even if some deeply ingrained assumptions have to be re-examined along the way. That's the message in poet and publisher Pat Boran's introduction to Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampler, published to celebrate the founding 21 years ago of the Dedalus Press by poet John F Deane. Eva Bourke, Fergus Allen, Gerard Fanning, Philip McDonagh, Paul Perry and Enda Wyley are among those whose work appears in the sampler.
Is a fear that the new digital technologies will render poetry impotent based on anything other than a fear of the new, asks Boran.
"Wouldn't Homer, who presumably had to carry his work around in his head, have been equally disturbed or puzzled by a written version of either of his epics, had he lived to see them written down, and rewritten, and then, in our own time, e-mailed across the world in seconds, or recorded by actors, downloaded into portable music players and listened to . . ." he says, persuasively making his case
• Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampleris published by Dedalus, €14