Archive News
Novelist Julian is no mug as he tops shortlist for Not The Booker Award
Date Published: {J}
He first came to the public eye as the singer with post punk Galway band Toasted Heretic in the late 1980s, then Julian Gough turned his hand to writing novels.
His latest, Jude in London has now topped the shortlist for the Guardian Not the Booker prize, the result of which will be announced in London in October, to coincide with the actual Booker Prize.
The Not the Booker Prize began in 2009 after some people complained that the Booker Prize judging process was too elite.
The prize for the alternative event is a Guardian mug – a far cry from the £50,000 Booker award, but being shortlisted does guarantee significant discussion of the book, especially among the online reading community.
Julian’s achievement in topping the shortlist is especially impressive, because the Not the Booker shortlist was announced on August 18 – and Jude in London isn’t due to be published until September 6.
His quest to make the shortlist saw him embark on an unusual campaign in which he emailed copies of the, as yet, unpublished novel to Guardian readers so they could write a 150-word review to submit to the judges. Julian ran a campaign on his blog, where he explained that he’d give the book to readers for free, hoping a sufficient number would nominate it. But they weren’t obliged to do so.
However, he requested that if they read it and liked it that they might buy a copy of Jude in London for a friend. That was to satisfy his publishers who were supportive of Julian’s campaign, but wary of giving away 100 copies of the unpublished book.
“We had a week to get a community of patient reviewers to read it,” explains Julian from Berlin, where he lives with his partner Ann Marie Fives and their six-year-old daughter, Sophie.
In total, he ended up getting 46 nominations – 11 more than his nearest rival.
“It’s about trying to use
the internet to do new things. I love the energy you can borrow from people. There were a few people I knew who had read and reviewed it, but the vast majority of reviews were from people I hadn’t met,” he explains.
The Not the Booker award is chaotic and has all the excess of the internet,” he says with relish.
However, on a serious note, it is also an attempt to see if a whole bunch of people can come up with a better list than the Booker. It is also “a test bed” for new ways of reading and fighting about books.
“I think people should fight about books more often. If we really care about books and literature, we’d be more passionate about them.”
Julian certainly has been passionate about his writing career, and spent some time on the breadline when he was writing his previous novel, Jude, Level 1.
“I was evicted in Ireland in 2006, during the Celtic Tiger years when there were higher rents,” he laughs. But it wasn’t funny at the time.
“We wandered around for a bit, staying in Dublin first where friends loaned us a house on half rent, but after a while we couldn’t even afford that so we got one for no rent in France and it was brilliant,” he recalls.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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