Memory comes under spotlight as Cúirt Festival extends run

American author Tobias Wolff may be the main man at this year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which runs from April 17-24, but the official opening will have a distinctly Galway flavour, with readings from Rita Ann Higgins, Elaine Feeney and Mike McCormack, as well as a recital from the St Patrick’s Brass Band. The opening is on Sunday, April 17, in the Meryrick Hotel and all are welcome.

Unsurprisingly, given the year that’s in it, the theme of Cúirt 2016 is memory.

The Festival’s commemoration of the 1916 will include a special focus on women’s involvement in the Easter Rising, and the status of women in Ireland, 100 years on.

Writers from more than 20 countries are taking part in Cúirt 2016, which has been extended to an eight-day festival from its previous six.

Those taking part will include three-times American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, award winning Irish novelists Kevin Barry and Jennifer Johnston, as well as Tobias Wolff – he will be reading on Thursday, April 21 when he will discuss his life’s work, focusing on the theme of memory.

Also from America comes Miriam Toews, who has been compared by the Los Angeles Times to Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Toews, who has published five novels, and a memoir of her father, was raised in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. Her latest book, All My Puny Sorrows, draws on this background. She will be at the Town Hall Theatre on Friday, April 22, at 4pm.

Cork author, Louise O’Neill, whose latest novel, Asking for It, on the theme of sexual assault against women has opened up a whole new debate on the issue, will join forces with American poet and writer Rachel B Glaser for a reading on Saturday, April 23. Glaser has just had her novel, Paulina and Fran published by Granta. She previously won the McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Fiction Award. That reading, at 3pm in the Town Hall Theatre will be chaired by journalist and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson, editor of The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of short stories by Irish women.

Novelists Jennifer Johnston and Belinda McKeown will be on stage in the same venue at 4.30pm on the same day, and will be followed by poets Rita Ann Higgins, Colette Boyce and Karen Solie.

Rita Ann will be reading from her latest book, Tongulish, which has just been published by Bloodaxe. Derry poet Colette Bryce’s latest collection, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe, won a special prize in memory of Seamus Heaney as part of the 2015 Christopher Ewart Biggs Award.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.