ARTS Westport’s first book festival dawns

Westport hosts first Rolling Sun Book Festival


Aine Ryan

BOOKWORMS, foodies, critics, environmentalists, choristers, poets, socialisers are about to be offered the chance to mingle and merge at the inaugural Rolling Sun Book Festival, to be held in Westport over the weekend of November 12 to 14 next.
The quirky boutique festival aims to evoke the deep layers of our Celtic traditions – bardic and poetic, musical and carnival, cultural and spiritual peppered with a cocktail of craic and a soupcon of daftness.
And where better to do that than in the shadow of the ancient spiritual mountain, Croagh Patrick. 
Fancy dining or even cooking with celebrity chef Tamasin Day Lewis who has long connections with the Westport and Louisburgh areas. Or gaining a deeper understanding of the lyricism and shadowed layers of award-winning writer, Claire Keegan’s works, which include Antartica, Walk the Blue Fields and her recently published story, Foster. Writing about Ms Keegan recently in The Irish Times, Eileen Battersby observed that ‘the genius of the finest short stories lies in what is left unsaid’.
“The feel for the form of the Wicklow-born writer Claire Keegan is as unwavering as if she had first begun to sing opera in the mountains without ever having a music lesson. Her subversive stories are written with the sureness of touch possessed by only the most natural of musicians,” Ms Battersby writes.
While likening her genius to that of the late John McGahern, among others, she suggested that ‘yet her stately, rhythmic prose, and its physicality, detached tone and assurance, are all her own’.
Of her latest work, Eileen Battersby writes: “Foster, Keegan’s winning entry for last year’s Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, is a haunting, crafted narrative making superb use of the first-person voice and of an urgent present tense.
It has beauty, harshness, menace and the spine of steel worthy of high art.”
Longford-born critic and writer, Belinda McKeon, who is a regular contributor to The Irish Times, will interview Ms Keegan after she has read from her work in the Plaza Hotel on Saturday morning, November 13.
Later that evening, Ms McKeon will read from her own work at the Sea, Sky and Shore Gallery on James Street.
Put poet Paul Durcan and Cór Mhaigh Eo together in the sanctified and hallow theatre that is Holy Trinity Church and it is certain the experience will be moving, ethereal. On Saturday night, the Rolling Sun Festival will host a recital of songs and poetry by this innovative mingling of song and poetry.
On a more earthy note, the subject of the rich resources of County Mayo’s wild Atlantic Ocean is set to be discussed and examined at the provocative Sunday Symposium to be held at 10.30am (and not 12.30pm, as stated in some of the brochures) at the Atlantic Coast Hotel. The panel includes Irish Times journalist, Lorna Siggins, James Ryan who is leading the National Wave Test Centre
project in Belmullet and Dr
Ken Whelan.
The Rolling Sun Book Festival will be opened by Harry Hughes at 9.30pm, at the Clew Bay Hotel, on Friday, November 12.
The full programme is on Facebook (search for Rolling Sun Festival), or, for further information, contact 098 28088.