Wednesday, Mar 17th 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 [...]
Victor Pelevin - Faber & Faber, 2008
Towards the end of the film The Lives of Others, the dissident writer Georg Dreyman, who has out-lasted the Stasi and its state to find a comfortable perch in the new Germany, happens across his one-time persecutor from the DDR hierarchy. The impotent apparatchik can’t resist taunting Dreyman - [...]