11.00 Morning Reading  / Bantry Bookshop / Free

BARBARA FITZGERALD (d. 1982)

Rupert Stutchbury will read from Barbara’s first novel We Are Beseiged.

Barbara Fitzgerald was born in Cork in 1911, the daughter of John Gregg, a Church of Ireland clergyman, who later became Primate of All Ireland. Educated in London and Dublin, she obtained a First Class honours degree in Modern Languages in Trinity College. We Are Beseiged was written during the latter years of World War II in the Bishop’s Palace, Armagh, where she and her children awaited her husband’s return from Africa. She died in Dublin in 1982, a year before the publication of her second novel, Footprint upon Water.

Rupert Stutchbury has recently played Polonius in a touring Theatre in Schools production of Hamlet; Frank, a gangster boss in an internet video American Creepo; and Fr. Storm in the feature film Jesus a Remake. He is currently touring with Gulliver’s Travelling Theatre.

13.00 Lunchtime Reading / Bantry Library / free

LIAM CARSON & DAMIEN ENRIGHT

Liam will read from his memoir Call Mother a Lonely Field.

Liam Carson was born in Belfast and studied English Literature and Philosophy at UCD. He is the director of the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival, which he founded in 2004. Key IMRAM projects have included the Gaelic Jazz Project and The Dylan Project, in which leading poets translated Bob Dylan’s work into Irish.  Liam has also worked as a literary publicist. His work has appeared in a wide range of periodicals. He lives in Dublin with his partner and daughter. He is well-known for talking at length about Bob Dylan after a few pints.

'Call Mother a Lonely Field is an immensely pleasurable book, and a valuable addition to the canon of Irish autobiography.’  Irish Times

Damien Enright will read from his memoir Dope in the Age of Innocence.

Damien Enright has written a weekly environmental column in the Irish Examiner for almost twenty years, regularly contributes to Irish and overseas magazines, and has written and presented RTÉ heritage programmes. His book A Place Near Heaven: A Year in West Cork received widespread critical acclaim. Not many people know he lived in Ibiza and Formentara during the 1960s, where he was involved in traveller cheque scams and was wanted by Spanish police after a drugs run to Turkey went wrong – events detailed in his pacey, moving memoir, Dope in the Age of Innocence.

14.30 – Afternoon Event / Maritime Hotel / €18

ROUTES TO PUBLICATION : A PANEL DISCUSSION

Join three authors to hear their experiences of finding publishers, being published and staying published. 

Clare Dowling is a number one Irish Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Too Close For Comfort.  She began her career as an actress and subsequently became a playwright, with six stage plays produced in Dublin.  She has written for children and is an award-winning screenwriter. 
For the past ten years she has written for RTE's Fair City.  She lives in Dublin with her family. 

David Miller lives in West London with his wife, the writer Kate Colquhoun, and their two sons. He was born in Edinburgh in 1966 and educated in Canterbury and at Cambridge. He is a director of the literary agency, Rogers, Coleridge & White. Today is his first novel.

Marjorie Quarton was born in 1930 near Nenagh.  She is a writer, editor and journalist. Her novels include Corporal Jack, serialised by BBC Radio 4, 1988, No Harp Like My Own, and Renegede.  Her memoir, Breakfast the Night Before, was serialised by RTÉ. She is the author of the bestselling series One Dog and his Man. Marjorie published three books in 2010, including Mary Cannon’s Commonplace Book, a collection of 300-year-old recipes and Part-Time Writer: Notes and Reflections.

14.30 – Afternoon Event / Maritime Hotel / €18

LAST DAYS OF THE USSR WITH CONOR O’CLERY & ELENA GOROKHOVA

This talk will offer two perspectives of the cataclysmic downfall of the Soviet Union.  Elena Gorokhova will offer a personal perspective of the time just before the change (the time that we now know had facilitated the change) as well as Gorbachev's perestroika and the coup, which she followed closely through family and friends. Conor O’Clery will speak about the very last day of the Soviet Union, 25 December 1991 – a low point in Russian history – and explain how it came about through the failure of communism and the deeply personal rivalry between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. 

Born in Belfast, Conor O’Clery worked for the Irish Times for over 30 years, and was foreign correspondent in London, Moscow, Washington, Beijing and New York. During these assignments he covered the Troubles, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, four US presidential elections, and the 9/11 attacks. He was twice Journalist of the Year in Ireland. The author of several books, Conor’s most recent, Moscow, 25 December 1991/ The Last Day of the Soviet Union, will be published in August. Conor lives in Dublin with his wife Zhanna.

Elena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and overflowing garbage bins behind them.  In 1980 she left the USSR for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life.  She has a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English, Linguistics and Russian. Her memoir about life in Soviet Russia, A Mountain of Crumbs, was published in 2010 and was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. She is married and has a daughter.

14.30 – Children’s Event / St Brendan’s School Hall / €5

TEEN POETRY READING WITH DAVE LORDAN & LEANNE O’SULLIVAN

Join the long-listed poets of our Teen Poetry Competition and see them perform their work with Dave Lordan and competition judge Leanne O’Sullivan. The winning poets will then receive their prize money from PEFC Ireland, sponsors of this event.

Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983 in Co. Cork.  She has published two collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books, Waiting for My Clothes (2004) and Cailleach; TheHag of Beara (2009).  She received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary in 2009, and in 2010 was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Dave Lordan is a writer, performer and workshop leader from Clonakilty. In 2007 his acclaimed first collection, The Boy In The Ring, became the first book to win both the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Strong Award for poetry. His second collection, Invitation to a Sacrifice, was described by the Irish Times 'an act of cultural resistance, as brilliant on the page as it must surely be in performance'. He is one of Ireland's leading performance poets, renowned for the humour, variety and emotional power of his live shows. He teaches performance poetry across Ireland with Youthspeaks.

17.00  Afternoon Reading / Bantry Library / free

Linda Grant will read from her new novel, We Had it So Good.

Linda Grant is one of the very few novelists to have both won the Orange Prize and been shortlisted for the Man Booker. She was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. The Cast Iron Shore won the David Higham First Novel Prize. When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Still Here was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Other works include Sexing the Millennium; Remind Me Who I am Again; The People on the Street, which won the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage; and The Thoughtful Dresser. The Clothes on Their Backs won The South Bank Show Literature Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008.

18.30 LAUNCH OF 2011 FISH ANTHOLOGY / St Brendan’s Church / free

An international celebration of writers and writing. There will be readings by the authors of the winning stories and poems from the Fish writing competitions, including Irish poet and writer Mary O’Donnell, who won the Fish Short Story Prize with The Space Between Louis and Me.

American poet Brian Turner will launch the annual Fish Anthology.  Brian judged the Poetry Prize, Simon Mawer the Short Story, and Chris Stewart handled Flash Fiction. The poets and writers in the Anthology come from all over the world, and this makes the launch a wonderful occasion to meet and hear new writers who are making a name for themselves.

20.30 Evening Reading / Maritime Hotel / €15

MICHAEL HOLROYD IN CONVERSATION WITH CARLO GEBLER

Winner of the Lifetime Services to Biography Award

Besides the Lives of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. His most recent book, A Strange Eventful History, winner of the James Tait Black Prize, was a biography of two great theatrical dynasties which included Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and her son Edward Gordon Craig. He has been president of the Royal Society of Literature and is the first non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

'Over thirty years Holroyd’s books have revolutionised the intellectual standing of biography, and popularised it through narrative flair, witty and immaculate scholarship’ Richard Holmes

22.45 Bedtime Story / Maritime Hotel / free

Bedtime story followed by open mike