MLC News Archive 2009

Featuring work from Martín Espada, Theo Dorgan, Billy Ramsell, the Seán Ó Faoláin Competition winner--Alexa Beattie, and the photography of John Minihan.

Martina Evans was born in 1961 to a large family in County Cork, where her mother ran a pub, a shop and a petrol station. The youngest of ten siblings, family and local history is a major presence in her work. After studying at UCC and St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, she began a fifteen-year career as a radiographer. Evans moved to London in the late 1980s, where she completed a degree in English and Philosophy with the Open University and began writing poetry and novels. Awards soon followed, including the Betty Trask Award in 1995 and the Arts Council England Award in 1999 for her novels Midnight Feast and No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors respectively. Additionally, she is involved in the writing community as a creative writing teacher (London Metropolitan University), competition judge (Listowel) and journalist (Irish Post, Irish Times and The Guardian)

Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland, in 1963 and currently lives in Dublin. Prior to taking over the running of the press in 2005, he had published four collections of poetry with Dedalus: The Unwound Clock (1990), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996) and As the Hand, the Glove (2001). His New and Selected Poems (first published by Salt Publishing in 2005) was reissued, with minor revisions, by Dedalus in November 2007.

The Munster Literature Centre is pleased to announce a new international poetry prize for a single poem. Click here for more information.

Ten runners-up to be published in Southword and receive €30 publication fee.

Anglo-Welsh author Simon Van Booy was announced as the winner of the 2009 Cork City - Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The announcement was made by Patrick Cotter on Sunday at the closing ceremony of the tenth annual Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. New York resident Van Booy (pronounced BOY) has won for his second collection of stories called Love Begins in Winter published in the UK by Beautiful Books and in the USA by Harper Perrennial. The award is worth 35,000 euro, the largest monetary prize for the short story form. Now in its fifth year, arguably the award has grown to be the world's most prestigious prize for writers of short stories. It is administered by the Munster Literature Centre in Cork and made possible through the generous sponsorship of Cork City Council.

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and The New York Post. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, now translated into several languages. He lives in New York City, where he teaches part-time at the School of Visual Arts and at Long Island University. He is also involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) for young adults living in underserved communities.

Cotter, Artistic Director of the Munster Literature Centre, declared in the judges' citation of Van Booy's book:

"While we believe that this was the most evenly-matched short-list ever in the award's history, containing six brilliant books by accomplished authors, after much rereading and long discussions the jury was convinced by one title in particular. Unusually for a work of serious literature this book won with its consistently positive and optimistic approach to examining the travails of human experience. It is an emotionally warming book which easily wins a place in the heart of the reader. The jury was impressed by the author's consummate mastery of the technique of classic short story writing. From the opening line he grabs the reader's attention and maintains focus. His language is lyrical and sings off the page. His stories are full of the most exquisite insights, aphoristic without ever seeming like mere conveyances for ideas. It is with great pleasure that we can present this award to Simon Van Booy for his book Love Begins in Winter."

For further information contact:

The Munster Literature Centre

Theatres, galleries, observatories, public laboratories, artist studios, historic houses and Churches are staying open late and putting on a range of special programmes, all for free. With over fifty venues and one hundred and fifty events there truly is something for everyone. Running from early evening until very late, you, your family and friends can explore Cork and its culture, all for free. Cork’s artists, venues and staffs have all welcomed and supported this project. We would like to thank them for all of their efforts in creating this programme for you to enjoy, again all for free.

First 100 people to arrive will receive a free anthology of Irish poetry. A film featuring an interview of Frank O’Connor made by the BBC in 1961 will be shown on loop. Made in Cork for the series Monitor, this 17 minute film is not only an affecting portrait of O’Connor but also of the North side of Cork City.

Visit th Cork Culture Night website for more information about this and other events.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh Public Interview by Billy Ramsell
Prize-winning Irish author interviewed by young poet. (see pages 16 & 17 of festival brochure)
Venue: Cork City Library, Grand Parade. Time: 4pm. Admission: Free.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh and MJ Farrell - Reading
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award twice nominated author reads with Irish debut author.
(see pages 3 & 16 of festival brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 8pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5.

Festival Club: Musician- Hank Wedel. Venue: The Long Valley (Hayloft), Winthrop St. Time: 10.00 - Late
(see page 25 of festival brochure)

Petina Gappah Public Interview by Ann Luttrell
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award nominated author from Zimbabwe talks to Literature Officer of the Triskel Arts Centre. (see pages 4 & 5 of festival brochure)
Venue: Cork City Library, Grand Parade. Time: 4pm. Admission: Free.

Shih Li Kow & Jack Harte - A Reading
A reading by Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award nominated author from Malaysia with the Chairman of the Irish Writers’ Centre. (see pages 9 & 11 of festival brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 7pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Petina Gappah & Liesl Jobson - A Reading
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award nominated author from Zimbabwe and a flash fiction specialist from South Africa. (see pages 4 & 10 of festival brochure)
A reading by Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 9pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Festival Club: Author - Madeleine Darcy with musicians Marja Gaynor and Eileen Healy. Venue: The Long Valley (Hayloft), Winthrop St. Time: 10.30 - Late (see page 25 of festival brochure)

Nude by Nuala Ní Chonchúir- Book Launch
former Southword fiction editor and prize-winning author Nuala Ní Chonchúir celebrates the
publication of Nude - her third collection of short stories. (see page 14 of festival brochure)
Venue: Cork City Library, Grand Parade. Time: 4pm. Refreshments Admission: Free.

Simon Van Booy & Billy O’Callaghan - A Reading
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award nominated British author from New York reads with Cork author who has just published his second collection of stories from Cork-based press Mercier.
(see pages 15 & 23 of festival brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 7pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Mary Morrissey & Charlotte Grimshaw - A Reading
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award twice nominated author from New Zealand reads with established Irish author. (see pages 6 & 13 of festival brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 9pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Festival Club: Author Kevin Doyle and musician Fintan Lucy. Venue: The Long
Valley (Hayloft), Winthrop St. Time: 10.30 - Late. (see page 25 of festival brochure)

Short Story Beginnings - A Workshop with Jon Boilard
An introduction to writing Short Stories given by Jon Boilard, former fiction editor of Southword and
winner of the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize. (see page 2 of festival brochure)
Venue: Munster Literature Centre, Douglas Street. Time: 11am -1pm. Fee: €40. Participation limited to eight individuals. Phone 021-4312955 to book.

Short Story Masterclass - A Workshop with Mary Morrissey
An advanced workshop exclusively for authors who have already published one or more short stories.
(see page 13 of festival brochure) Venue: Munster Literature Centre, Douglas Street. Time: 11am -1pm. Fee: €40. Participation limited to five individuals. Phone 021-4312955 to book.

Who has won the Sean Ó Faoláin Prize?
The announcement and reading of the winning short story of the €1500 2009 Sean Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize.
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 2pm. Admission: free.

The State of the Art - A Discussion
An open conversation involving a selection of festival participants.
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 4pm. Admission: Free.

Wells Tower & Sude - A Reading
Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award nominated author from the United States reads with Shanghai
author who is on a residency with the Munster Literature Centre. (see pages 19 & 21 of festival
brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 7pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Alan Titley & ZZ Packer - A Reading
Readings by two established and respected authors each known for the their laugh-out loud humour. One from Ireland and one from the United States. (see pages 18 & 20 of festival brochure)
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 9pm. Admission: Suggested donation €5

Festival Club: Author Jon Boilard and musician Perry Wild. Venue: The Long
Valley (Hayloft), Winthrop St. Time: 10.30 - Late (see page 25 of festival brochure)

Announcement of the Winner of the 2009 Cork City - Frank O’Connor Short Story Award
This is where we reveal which of our six shortlistees has been judged author of the best short story collection of the year in English with a purse of €35,000.
Venue: Stack Theatre - Cork School of Music, Union Quay. Time: 4.30 pm. Admission: Free. Refreshments will be served.

Reservations
Reservations will be taken only for workshops. Places at other events are on a first come, first served basis. Events will start on time. To reserve a workshop space please phone the Munster Literature Centre on 021-4312955 or email info(AT)munsterlit(DOT)ie.

Venues
All workshops will be held at the Munster Literature Centre, Frank O’Connor House, 84 Douglas Street, Cork.
All other events are at the Cork School of Music’s Stack Theatre on Union Quay or the Cork City Central Library on Grand Parade, Cork.
A suggested donation of €5 is requested for each of the evening events, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds and larger donations are also welcome.

The shortlist for the 2009 Cork City-Frank O'Connor Short Story Award has been decided by an international jury. The award at 35,000 euro is the richest prize in the world for the short story form and is given annually to an original collection of stories judged to be the best. Previous winners have included Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li. The award is organised by the Munster Literature Centre with generous funding from Cork City Council. Notable names edged out for a position on this year's shortlist include Booker winner Kazuo Ishiguro, Orange Prize winner Chimanda Ngozi Adiche, veteran short story authors Ali Smith, Mary Gaitskill and James Lasdun and reviewers' darling Sana Krasikov. The winner will be announced in Cork on September 20th at the closing ceremony of the tenth Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival which is the oldest annual short story festival in the world.

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organisation that provides legal aid on international trade law to developing countries. Her story collection, An Elegy for Easterly is published by Faber in April 2009. She is currently completing The Book of Memory, her first novel. Both books will also be published in Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Charlotte Grimshaw is a fiction writer. Her first novel was described as ‘New Zealand noir,’ and her later books continue to draw from a range of genres and dramatic situations. Grimshaw has contributed short fiction to anthologies, was awarded the 2006 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award, and published her first short story collection in 2007. Titled Opportunity, this collection was short-listed for the world’s richest short fiction prize, the Cork City - Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow published by Silverfish Books, Malaysia

Shih-Li Kow was born in Kuala Lumpur and was educated for the most part in schools in Malaysia. Her stories have been published in the anthologies, News from Home and Silverfish New Writing 7. Shih-Li Kow holds a degree in chemical engineering and worked as an industrial engineer in a multinational consumer products company for more than ten years. She is currently in retail. She resides in Kuala Lumpur with her extended family and son, Jack.

The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh Published by Penguin Ireland.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh has lived and worked at a variety of jobs in Ireland, Spain, Russia, the United States, Kosovo and Georgia. He has lived mostly in Bucharest since 2000 where among other things he translates English subtitles for Romanian films. He has won the Glen Dimplex Award and the Rooney Prize for his first short story collection Notes from A Turkish Whorehouse which was also shortlisted for the Cork City - Frank O’Connor Award in 2006.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower Published by FSG New York and Granta UK

Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.

Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy published by Harper Perennial New York and Beautiful Books London.

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and the New York Post. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, now translated into several languages. He lives in New York City, where he teaches part-time at the School of visualArts and at Long Island University. He is also involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) for young adults living in undeserved communities.

Lloren A. Foster, Ph. D. an Assistant Professor of English at Hampton University. He has a BA in English from Chicago State University (1998) and a Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2007). He fashions himself a Literary Historian and Cultural Critic whose research interests are focused on storytelling and narrative in the Short Story of the African Diaspora.

Milka Jankowska: for three years she has been co-ordinating the International Short Story Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. She has also been working in the Wroclaw Book Fair Bureau, organising the international book fair under the auspices of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and Polish Publishers Association. M.J. is also a translator (English-Polish) for various publishing houses (14 translations of British, American and Australian authors, literary and commercial fiction – novels, stories etc.).

Vincent McDonnell is an award-winning author of books for adults and young readers. Born in County Mayo, he worked in England for a number of years. He now lives in County Cork with his wife and son.
He has previously written two adult novels and four novels for children. The Broken Commandment, his first novel for adults, was published after a recommendation by Graham Greene and won the GPA First Fiction Award in 1989. Vincent won the 2003 Francis McManus Short Story competition for his story entitled "Lemon Creams".

"I am greatly excited by this first exclusively online edition of Southword, with brilliant contributions from poets with global reputations, as well as those at the beginning of their career. The fiction section is especially venturous with cutting-edge new writers, as well as a translation from the Romanian. While it is obvious we are open globally to submissions by poets and short story writers we continue our policy of providing one of the few reliable reviewing outlets exclusively for Munster authors, especially poets.

Please write and tell us what you think. Inevitably most readers of this issue will be experiencing Southword for the first time."

The Munster Literature Centre regrets the passing of Frank McCourt Sunday, 19 July 2009. He had been in treatment for both meningitis and skin melanoma in a New York hospice, and had made the city his home for many years.

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, he was also the author of two more autobiographies and a children's story, Angela and the Baby Jesus. In addition to writing he also pursued a long career as a teacher. Read more about the author here.

The Munster Literature Centre regrets the passing of David Marcus on Saturday, May the 9th. He is survived by his wife, novelist and Aosdána member Ita Daly, and his daughter, Sarah.

Marcus was a writer of short stories, plays and poetry and also translated from the Irish Seán Ó Riordáin and Brian Merriman. He is most well known, however, for his generosity as an editor who nurtured the careers of many Irish writers such as Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe.

David Marcus established both Irish Writing and Poetry Ireland in Cork in the 1940s, and as a result his legacy in the literary community in Ireland will never be forgotten. In a ceremony in Dún Laoghaire last year, Marcus was honoured by William Wall and many others in a tribute to his wealth of achievements and contributions. Our deepest sympathy goes out to his friends and family members.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh named Fiction Editor of Southword and judge of the 2009 Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition

The Munster Literature Centre is pleased to announce the appointment of Philip Ó Ceallaigh as the new fiction editor of Southword. Born in County Waterford, he has published two short story collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (London/Dublin, Penguin, 2006), for which he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature in 2006; and The Pleasant Light of Day (Penguin, 2009). He has lived and worked in Britain, Spain, Russia, the US, Kosovo, Georgia and Bucharest.

He will also serve as the judge of the 2009 Sean O'Faolain Short Story Competition sponsored by the Munster Literature Centre. Full details of the competition, including submission guidelines, are available on the Seán Ó Faoláin page.

Southword No. 15 On Sale Now
Southword No. 15, edited by James Harpur and Nuala Ní Chonchúir, is now available for purchase. The new issue includes poetry, reviews and the shortlisted works from the 2008 Sean O'Faolain Short Story Competition. Visit our online bookstore for other titles or click here to order Southword 15.

James Harpur Awarded the Michael Hartnett Annual Poetry Award 2009 for The Dark Age
The Munster Literature Centre congratulates workshop leader James Harpur, who has been awarded the Michael Hartnett Annual Poetry Award 2009 for his fourth collection of poetry, The Dark Age. Funded by Limerick County Council and the Arts Council, it is one of the biggest poetry prizes in the country.
According to the judges, ‘James Harpur’s The Dark Age is a book in which the poems are serious and well wrought. The poems build into a collection in which the imaginative shifts carry the reader into areas that are too often left unexplored. These poems demonstrate a mastery both of the short form and the more sustained poetic narrative, and the handling of poetry technique is impressive throughout. The sequences of short poems in Part Two vary the sonnet structure inventively, and yet content is never sacrificed to form. Harpur has dared to delve seriously into themes that are too often left unvisited in the 21st century, making aspects of spirituality a process in contemporary concerns. Although the poetry makes a long journey into the interior darkness there is not a hint of self-indulgence. The use of characters from early religious and biblical narratives allows areas of complex feeling to be given a dramatic utterance, so that one encounters the spiritual pressure behind these poems with a surprising freshness and pertinence".’ Further information on James Harpur is available here.