Cúirt festival offered week of intimate reading experiences

Hearing writers read their own work and explaining how and why they write is an intimate experience.

At last week’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature audiences were treated to a lot of intimate events as Booker Prize winners, poets and first-time novelists shared their stories.

The reading by Eleanor Catton, who won last year’s Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, was sold out for weeks and just about every other event enjoyed full houses too.

Roddy Doyle, the 1993 Booker winner for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha was paired with Hugo Hamilton (The Speckled People) on Thursday night and it worked very well, despite their very different writing styles.

Surprisingly, more people wanted to know why Hamilton wrote his latest book, based on his friendship with the late Nuala O Faoláin than asked about Doyle’s latest book, The Guts, a follow-up to The Commitments.

On Friday evening, one woman in the audience spoiled it for many when she gave away the ending of Donal Ryan’s new novel, The Thing About December. Ryan handled it well by reminding his audience that they could interpret the ending any way they liked, just as readers did with The Spinning Heart.

The Tipperary native played a blinder with his honesty and humour as he talked about the writing process and how some people in his small village believe certain characters are based on them!

He was paired with the Irish playwright and TV producer, Anakana Schofield who now lives in Canada and who has just published her first novel, Malarky. She was very funny and quirky, and had the audience in stitches with her long answers to the questions from Cúirt Director, Dani Gill, who chaired the event. More often than not, Schofield didn’t answer the questions but made up for it with her scatty, funny persona.

Thursday’s lunchtime event in An Taibhdhearc saw Eimear McBride in conversation with fellow novelist Kathleen McMahon. If the subject matter of McBride’s book, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, is dark, their discussion  was very enjoyable – and inspiring – again because of the writer’s openness.

The book took nine years to get published. McBride spent five years trying different publishers, as did her agent. She gave up and started writing her second book, then moved to Norwich and came across fledgling publishers, Gallery Beggar, who were looking for new unpublished work. The book was finally published  in June.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.