11.00 Morning Reading / Bantry Bookshop / free
LOTHAR LUKEN & KAREN O’CONNOR will be reading from new work.

Lothar Luken has been living near Bantry for over 30 years. He's had his poems published in Ireland, the UK, Germany and Australia, and particularly enjoys performing them – for which he won the 2009 West Cork Lit Fest poetry slam. He's been the editor of Earthwatch Magazine for many years and is a regular contributor to Humanism Ireland.
Karen O’Connor is a poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Her poetry has been translated into French, Dutch and Irish.  Her first collection Fingerprints (On Canvas) appeared from Doghouse in 2005, her second collection Between The Lines will be published this year. Karen has been shortlisted for the Fish International Poetry Prize 2006 & 2007, the Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Competition 2010 and she won The Nora Fahy Literary Award for short fiction.

11.45 Heritage Walk with Hazel Vickery

Assemble outside Bantry Library, Bridge Street

Are you visiting Bantry and interested in finding out more about the history of the town? Take a walk with Hazel Vickery and learn how Bantry developed over the years. The tour will take about an hour and ends at the Library in time for the lunchtime reading.

13.00 Lunchtime Reading / Bantry Library / free

Peter Benson
Novelist Peter Benson, also giving a workshop, will give a reading from his new novel Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke.
'One of the most distinctive voices in modern British fiction.' Evening Standard

'Vividly, defiantly realistic at times, luridly surreal at others, his writing’s ability to compound striking metaphors of the abstract with a graphic physicality has won him a deserved following.' The Times Literary Supplement

'A sharp stylist.' Sunday Telegraph

14.30 – Afternoon Event / The Mariner / €18
HOW TO KEEP THE WOLF FROM THE DOOR with CARLO GÉBLER
Grub-street (from the Oxford English Dictionary):
1. orig. The name of a street near Moorfields in London … ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’ (J.); hence used allusively for the tribe of mean and needy authors, or literary hacks.
2. attrib. or as adj. Pertaining to, emanating from, or characteristic of Grub-street; of the nature of literary hack-work; rarely, like a needy scribbler.

It is always best to know your place and Carlo Gébler believes his is on Grub Street. In this seminar he will offer an A to Z of life on Grub Street as he has known it. His take will be personal, eclectic and neither reverent nor polite.

Carlo Gébler was born in Dublin in 1954 and is the author of travel books, novels, memoirs and plays, including 10 Rounds, which was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs award. He has taught at Trinity College, Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, and has been writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry since 1997. His film Put to the Test won the 1999 Royal Television Society award. He is married, with five children. 

14.30 Afternoon Event / Maritime Hotel / €18
YEATS AND BECKETT: HOW DEAD AUTHORS LIVE with PROFESSOR TERENCE BROWN
As one of Ireland’s foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown’s command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary cannon is second to none and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish Studies. In this lecture, based on essays from his book, The Literature of Ireland, Culture & Criticism, he will speak about the legacy of two of Ireland’s greatest writers.
Terence Brown, writer and critic, is Fellow Emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin, where he formerly held a personal chair of Anglo-Irish literature. He has published widely on Irish literature and culture and has lectured in many parts of the world. 

14.30 Children’s Reading / Maritime Hotel / €5

AN AFTERNOON with MICHAEL MORPURGO

Michael Morpurgo is the former Children’s Laureate and best-selling author of over 120 books for children including Private Peaceful, Kensuke’s Kingdom and War Horse, which was first performed at the National Theatre in 2007 and will be made into a forthcoming film by Dreamworks. Michael was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature in 2007. His latest novel is Shadow.

16.00 Book Launch / Bantry Library
Hugo Hamilton will launch Alms On The Highway, an Anthology by the M.Phil Creative Writing class from Trinity College Dublin. All welcome.

17.00 Afternoon Reading / Bantry Library / free
GERALD DAWE AND JOHN BENNETT
Gerald Dawe will read from his collections, Lake Geneva and Points West, both from Gallery Press.
Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe moved to Galway in 1974 where he lived and worked in University College Galway for many years. In 1988 he was appointed lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin where he is currently Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre, School of English, and director of the internationally regarded Trinity graduate writing programme. He has published seven collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, most recently, Points West (2008). His Selected Poems will be published by Gallery in 2012. He has also published with Lagan Press, several collections of essays, including The World as Province (2009) Conversations: Poets and Poetry will appear this summer from Lagan Press.

Last year John Bennett moved from the centre of Sydney to live beside a forest by the sea; he will read recent poems investigating the transformation.
John Bennett is a widely published poet, who has won the major Australian poetry competitions (the Newcastle and the David Tribe) and been translated into four languages. He is a past president of the Australian Poets Union, Sydney Harbour Artist of the Year and poet-in-residence at the Macleay Museum. After working for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, he gained a PhD for work on poetics and nature poetry. He subsequently lectured at Wollongong University and developed courses on ecological thinking and eco-literacy for The University of Sydney. He is a bush flâneur who teaches eco-poetry and is the Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers & Writers Festival. 

18.30  Early Evening Event / The Mariner / €5
A READING WITH BRIAN TURNER
Brian Turner will be reading from his collections Phantom Noise and Here, Bullet.
Brian Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals. He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

20.30 Evening Event / Maritime Hotel / €15

AN EVENING WITH DAVID MITCHELL

David Mitchell was born in Southport in January, 1969. His first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best book by a writer under 35 and was also shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, number9dream, was shortlisted for the 2001 Man Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003, he was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, Cloud Atlas, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, and the Best Literary Fiction and Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year categories in the British Book Awards. It was shortlisted for a further six awards including the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. His fourth novel, Black Swan Green, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Prize.  David Mitchell now lives in Ireland.

22.30 Courtroom Reading / The Courtroom Áras Beantraí / €5.00

Murder and Intrigue at the Courtroom
with Carlo Gébler , Eoin McNamee and Hugh Fit zgerald Ryan

Come along to our late-night crime and spook reading and soak up the atmosphere in Bantry Courthouse with three masters of murder, intrigue and violence.

Carlo Gébler will read from The Dead Eight, a novel based on events in 1940 when Harry Gleeson discovered the body of Moll McCarthy in a field in Co. Tipperary. She had been shot twice in the face. Within days of reporting the body, Harry Gleeson was arrested and later convicted of her murder. Why did an entire community look away when an innocent man was condemned to death?
Harry Gleeson was hanged in Mountjoy in 1941.

Eoin McNamee will read from Orchid Blue
Eoin McNamee was born in Kilkeel, County Down, in 1961. He was educated in various schools in the North of Ireland and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book, the novella The Last of Deeds, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize and his novels include Resurrection Man, which was later made into a film, and The Blue Tango which was long-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Sligo.


Hugh Ryan will read from his novel, The Devil to Pay, his chilling re-telling of Ireland's first witch trial, which took place in the claustrophobic walled Anglo-Norman town of Kilkenny.

Hugh Ryan was born in 1941 in Skerries, and has written six novels set in different historical periods, including The Kybe, Reprisal, On Borrowed Ground, Ancestral Voices, In the Shadow of the Ombú Tree. He took early retirement from teaching in order to write and to work as an artist, mainly in watercolour.  He is married to Margaret.  They have eight adult children and eight grandchildren.