Patricia’s Blog
It looks like good weather for the holiday weekend in Ireland. Time for breaks and trips. I like to link text and place when travelling. As I’m heading off to County Mayo, I thought I would pull together – in a fairly random way – some of my favourite texts linked to some wonderful Mayo…
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Controversy has a way of revolving around words in Ireland in a strange way. Even when Barak Obama, President of the United States, visits we get caught up in a national debate about Enda Kenny’s welcoming speech in College Green, Dublin, and his use of Barak Obama’s very own words. But, An Taoiseach’s gift of words to…
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I haven’t yet read Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz – only the first chapter that you can read on BBB 4 web site and where you can also hear an interview with the author herself. It was my Kindle e-book reader that first got me into reading first chapters. Reading first chapters for free became my favourite Kindle…
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Mae Leonard’s new book of poetry makes me think of a patchwork quilt – places, family, history, tragedies and quirky events all woven into a wonderful and seamless whole. I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This has just been published by Doghouse Books and was launched at Limerick’s On the Nail Readings event where Mae read with…
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In a nice piece of symmetry Kathleen MacMahon’s novel, So This Is How It Ends, recently signed by Little Brown (UK) and Grand Central (US), will be published in 2012, the centenary of the birth of Mary Lavin, the author’s grandmother. ‘My memory of grandmother as a writer,’ Kathleen MacMahon said, ‘is of her in bed with…
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They’re a fussy lot in our Book Club but each and everyone gave the thumbs up to Paul Soye’s The Boy In The Gap. Can it really be that this is his first novel, so fine is the writing achievement? We were into the suspense from the very first line, I remember the first night…
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Michael Longley’s new volume A Hundred Doors is slim and snug and almost weightless in the hand. He returns again, almost apologetically, to a place that changed his life: ‘I am writing too much about Carrigskeewaun.’ He is there for the millennium, at Christmas, at lambing time, and – for the first time – with his new…
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So said Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian at the opening of the DublinSwell event in the city’s gleaming, green-lit, Convention Centre last week. This, she said, was Ireland’s largest literary event ever. It was a celebration of Dublin’s listing as a UNESCO City of Literature – one of only four cities in the world to receive this…
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Catherine Morris is curator of the National Library of Ireland exhibition Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival at Kildare Street, Dublin. Next Tuesday she will present a guided tour of the exhibition dealing with the life of an intriguing woman. Alice Milligan (1866-1953), from the Northern Ireland Protestant Unionist tradition, put Northern Ireland at the centre of…
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I was back In Achill recently when the wind roared and the Atlantic churned and the mist hid the outlines of Slievemore. I did a quick car tour of some literary haunts. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries writers and visual artists flocked to Achill, helped by the extension of the railway line to the…
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