ARTS Six days in Cúirt

Matthew Young

Six days in Cúirt


Áine Ryan

HER late grandmother, Mary Lavin, would certainly be proud of her. After all she caused a serious frisson of excitement throughout the Irish literary world when she was awarded the biggest book deal at last year’s London Book Fair: a whopping £600,000 sterling for the rights to her first two novels.
Now RTÉ journalist Kathleen McMahon is set to discuss her forthcoming first novel ‘This Is How It Ends’ at the six-day Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which takes place from April 24 to 29 in Galway. As well as talking to Vincent Woods about her debut novel, which has been described by Rebecca Saunders, a senior editor at Little Brown, as a ‘love story for our times’, McMahon will also read from one of her grandmother’s short stories. This tribute marks the centenary of Mary Lavin’s birth.
McMahon’s ‘in conversation with’ at the Town Hall Theatre is just one of the many events in the busy programme of the 27th annual Cúirt festival, which is amongst the biggest of its kind in the country.
This year’s festival will focus on ‘how we engage with literature, the exploration of language, the rise of the e-reader and the many levels on which literature communicates with us’. In a panel discussion, ‘e-book v real book’, publishing experts Eoin Purcell, Isolde Roche, Matthew Young and Michael Bhaskar will hammer out the pros and cons of the printed word and online reading.  Dani Gill, the Programme Director, says the festival will also explore ‘the writer-reader relationship, which is at the very heart of the Cúirt festival’. Accordingly, another panel discussion will look at ‘The practice of writing: words and their readers’.
The Cúirt 2012 line-up includes such distinguished Irish writers as John Banville, Paul Durcan, Rita-Ann Higgins, Gerald Dawe, Peter Fallon and Marina Carr. An award-winning playwright, Carr will give two drama master-classes focussing on ‘Betrayal’, by Harold Pinter, for the first session and ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, by William Shakespeare for the second. Character, plot and structure will be explored and participants must read the texts before the classes. Both Dawe and Fallon will also give masterclasses examining how a poem grows and is structured.

Imagination and reality
THE British Council of Literature deems Irish writer, John Banville to be ‘the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation’. It says he is ‘a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality and the existential isolation of the individual’. At this year’s Cúirt festival, Banville, whose novel ‘The Sea’ won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, will read at the Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday evening, April 25.
Banville will share the stage with Richard Beard, ‘the author of five highly inventive novels’, including ‘X20’, which features a narrator who writes down something every time she craves a cigarette. Beard, who is Director of the National Academy of Writing in London, re-imagines the life of Lazarus in his last novel, ‘Lazarus is Dead’.
As usual, Cúirt will host a plethora of writers, of every genre, from around the world. They include North American writers, Amy Bloom and Billy Collins as well as Spanish writers Kirmen Uribes and  Manuel Rivas. The English translation of Rivas’s book, ‘The Disappearance of Snow’ will be launched by Jonathan Dunne in Hotel Meyrick on Friday, April 27. Rivas will read alongside local poet Lorna Shaughnessy, who translated the work, originally published in Spain’s four official languages.
A review in El Pais states that in ‘The Disappearance of Snow’: “… Rivas strives to excavate spaces of origin in the land and in a world (Galicia) that offers something at once primitive and virgin, that generates the myths that accompany the lyric subject, reclaiming the territory … of childhood … and that sheds light on [his] cultural and emotional icons …”.
Cúirt’s recently introduced Outreach programme continues to engage with new audiences by bringing some of the festival atmosphere outside of the main venues. Kitchen Readings, with Australian poet Robyn Rowland and harpist Lynn Saoirse, will be hosted in a number of houses in Westside and Ballybane.

For more information or to book tickets, visit www.cuirt.ie