The Tailor (Ronan Wilmot) and Ansty (Nuala Hayes)
Yesterday was one of those days you don’t expect.
I somehow got into a discussion with some elderly people who were defensive about the good old days and the sense of spirit and community they experienced in the Ireland of the forties and fifties (and probably up [...]

Two new books, out of thousands of others, are on the shelves today - The Wow Signal, by Patrick Chapman, and Redemption Falls, by Joseph O’Connor
There are so many Irish books coming on stream that it’s not practical for me to mention them all, but I mention Patrick because he’s my colleague and co-founder [...]

Some years ago - it must have been the mid-eighties - Paula Meehan and I were invited to read in Donegal (Ramelton, I think). Our host brought us to the top of a beautiful stone building where there was a roaring fire, and into a back room where we were invited to drink a [...]

When I published my last novel, The Fisher Child in November 2000, the omens seemed good. It sold a stack of copies at the launch, it had a number of nice reviews, including in the TLS, and then…
It was published on the 14th of November, a date etched on my mind, and despite [...]

Just about a year ago, Patrick Chapman and I set up an experiment called Irish Literary Revival. As we put it in our introduction,
This is where out-of-print and out-of-circulation Irish books are brought back into the world. Although our name is a pun, our intentions are serious.
Would that we both had more time to [...]

See New York Times obit (may require registration)
Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84

It’s a great pleasure to welcome the arrival of the new online journal, the Dublin Review of Books, otherwise known as drb.
It’s a free quarterly online journal
whose object is the publication of clear and insightful writing based on recently published books. Articles will normally be review essays of between 3,000 and 7,000 words. In [...]

Sinead Gleeson over at The Sigla Blog has a lovely piece, Farewell Benedict Kiely, on the late, great writer.
See Benedict Kiely at Irish Writers Online
Benedict Kiely tribute at RTÉ News
Wikipedia entry on Benedict Kiely

I do my best to avoid schadenfreude - it’s kind of childish after all - but somehow, this one was too hard to resist.
You may have heard about it, so I’ll cut to the quick.
The great Italian politician and tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, made the mistake of paying some off-kilter compliments to not one, [...]

The National Library of Ireland has described as a “major boost for Irish scholars” its acquisition of an extensive collection of 800 printed and other items by and about Samuel Beckett.
see report in The Irish Times