José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

Some say Palestine is the ultimate test of honesty: An open letter written in response to the news that the novelist and poet Margaret Atwood had chosen to accept the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University in Israel on Monday 10th of May. Originally published in Salem-News.com on the 9th of May 2010. [...]

This paper was delivered to The Kate O’Brien Weekend, Saturday February 27th 2010.
Irish writers are more insiders than outsiders now. We have the Arts Council to give us bursaries, albeit much reduced since the Depression began; we have Aosdána to support us in our old age; we have Ireland Literature Exchange to help our work [...]

Excerpts from works by novelists who didn’t even get a look-in at this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, won by Romanian-born German novelist and poet Herta Müller.
Eric thought nothing of knocking out a couple of dozen portraits a day. Lenin. Bruce Lee. Archbishop Makarios. JFK. Rolf Harris. What frustrated him was how easily it came [...]

The Irish Seminar, which is currently underway and runs until the 3rd of July, provides a wide variety of lectures, seminars and workshops on Irish studies by a number of writers, academics, journalists and curators. The topics include Irish literature, culture, politics and society within an international context and should be of interest to readers [...]