Prix Goncourt Winner
The 2008 Prix Goncourt, perhaps France’s most prestigious literary prize, has been awarded to the writer and filmmaker Atiqu Rahimi for his novel Syngué sabour. Pierre de Patience.
Rahimi, born in Kabul in 1962, was raised in a “liberal and westernised” family and attended the Franco-Afghan lycée. His father, a judge, and his uncle were imprisoned after a coup in the 1970s and his brother was killed in the Afghan war.
Rahimi left Afghanistan finally in 1984 and pursued university studies in France. He adapted his first novel, Terre et Cendres, for cinema and it won the Regards d’Avenir prize at Cannes in 2004. Syngué sabour, which centres on a dialogue between a dying “war hero” and his wife, is the first novel he has written in French.
The Prix Goncourt is more important for the prestige and guaranteed sales it bestows on the winner than for the prize money. Previous winners have included Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux, Michel Tournier, Marguerite Duras and Andreï Makine.
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Seamus Heaney Lecture Series
The next lecture in the series will be given on Monday, November 17th, when Prof Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto will speak on the theme “All changed? Culture and Identity in Contemporary Ireland”. The venue is St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin and the time 8pm.
Admission is free and refreshments will be served after the lecture. See
http://www.spd.dcu.ie/shl for further details. Please spread the word among your friends and colleagues.
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The inaugural An Foras Feasa SeathrúnCéitinn/Geoffrey Keating lecture will be given by Professor Joep Leerssen of the University of Amsterdam at Castletown House, Celbridge at 5 pm on Tuesday, 23rd September. The lecture is entitled “Historical Consciousness, Cultural Memory, Irish Literature”. Prof Leerssen recently received the NWO/Spinoza Prize for his innovative contributions to imagology and Irish studies and for his research into cultural nationalism.
All are welcome. If you wish to attend, please rsvp to foras.feasa@nuim.ie or phone (01) 7086173 as
seating is limited.
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Amy Friedlander, director of programmes at the American Council on Library and Information Resources, will give a free lecture entitled “Digits and Dreams: Scholarship and Computing in the Age of Abundance” on Tuesday, September 23rd at 4 pm at the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin.
The talk gives an account of recent changes in technology and scholarship,
considering broad patterns in both sciences and humanities, but focusing on
the future challenges and opportunities for the humanities. The Council on
Library and Information Resources (CLIR) supports a broad agenda that
addresses relationships among information, scholarship, technology, and
higher education.
Amy Friedlander is primarily engaged in projects involving cyberinfrastructure, preservation, and digital scholarship. She is the founding editor of D-Lib Magazine and also participated in the
organisational phases of the Library of Congress’s National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Programme.
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Academic Opportunities
Anyone working in Ireland or Britain on eighteenth century Ireland whose
research could benefit from a week or two examining materials in North
American collections is invited to consider applying for the Irish-American
Research Travel Fellowship set up by the late AC Elias Jr in the
early 1990s. The fellowship is administered by the American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, which gathers applications. Further information is available on ASECS’s website, (http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/travel.html)
Subject to the creation of a new academic unit in 2009 in Canadian Irish Studies,
Concordia University, Montreal invites candidates for a position in any period of
Irish and/or Irish Diasporic History, especially social and cultural
history. For details of the post and conditions contact:
Dr Michael Kenneally, Director, Centre for Canadian Irish Studies
Michael.Kenneally@concordia.ca
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Ciaran Carson Celebration
The journal An Sionnach is inviting submissions for a special issue on Ciaran Carson.
Critical readings and responses to Carson’s poetry, prose, and translations are sought (2,500-5,000 words). The deadline is October 17th, 2008. Previously published material will be considered.
Based at Creighton University Press and distributed by the University of
Nebraska Press, An Sionnach publishes scholarly articles, visual arts,
poetry and creative prose, as well as interviews and reviews.
Please email your submission, along with a cover letter, to both:
Dr David Gardiner, Editor
gardiner@creighton.edu
and
Prof Piotr Florczyk, Guest Editor
pflorczyk@hotmail.com
Submissions may also be submitted directly to the journal website:
http://www.an-sionnach.com .
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Books Crisis in Japan
Experts in Japan say the publishing industry is facing a historic crisis, the Japan Times reports. More than 200 new books are published daily in the country, and the total market for books and magazines surpasses ¥2 trillion. But hundreds of bookstores nationwide shut down every year, and the market has largely been shrinking since 1996.
The number of shops belonging to the Japan Booksellers Federation, a national industry group of bookstores selling newly published books, came to 5,869 in 2008, down from a peak of 12,953 in 1986. One reason is that people are simply reading fewer books while tapping into other new media that have emerged in recent years.
According to an annual survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun, 52% of 1,812 adult respondents said last October they had not read a book in the previous month, 14 points ahead of the figure recorded 20 years earlier.
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“It is rare,” writes Yann Plougastel in Le Monde dated tomorrow (August 29th), “for a writer to conform so little to the idea we have of what a writer should look like. With his washed-out blue eyes, broad forehead and tall stature, nimble angler’s hands and legs like a tired cowboy (?), Richard Ford … might have played in a Clint Eastwood film. Or worked at a service station in a lost corner of Missouri. ” Or played bass with Bruce Springsteen, apparently. Qu’ils sont romantiques, ces Français!
“Richard Ford became a writer by accident,” Plougastel continues. “After a bad boy period in which he experienced prison, he read a lot of Faulkner and Hemingway, and through the beautiful eyes of Kristina, still his companion, began to note down sentences, scraps of dialogue, then to assemble the puzzle, without any preconceived idea. Five novels, three short story collections and a Pulitzer prize later, Ford is considered one of the greatest American writers of his generation.”
The autumn issue of the Dublin Review of Books (due mid-September) will feature a long essay on /interview with Richard Ford conducted by Kevin Stevens.
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Pankaj Mishra, writing in last Saturday’s (August 23rd) Guardian book review, is reminded while reading obituaries of Solzhenitsyn of remarks by Philip Roth about some of the differences between the situations of writers East and West towards the (provisional and temporary, it now seems) end of the Cold War.
Mishra writes: “Roth summed up the marginality of literary novelists such as himself in the west with a neat little formula: ‘There nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.'”
Looking back at the review pages of British and American journals in the 1970s and 1980s, Mishra remarks, “is to marvel at the extensive and respectful attention paid to these writers, many of whom – Milan Kundera, Klima, Josef Skvorecky – are still being published, but not with the same fanfare”.
Mishra goes on to make the point that some dissident writers who were dissident against authoritarian regimes allied to what we used to call the Free World were not quite so feted in the West and hints darkly that political considerations might have entered – for the first time surely – into the heads of a Nobel jury (“Rarely has the … prize been awarded to a corpus as slender as Gao Xingjian’s Beijing Coma …”)
The points Mishra makes about links between dissidence, celebrity and consequent marketability are valid ones. It may however be the case that there is really no dark plot on the part of publishers – or rather that the dark plot is, as ever, to make money. And surely the best way to make money is to copy what someone else who is making it is doing. Well, the second best.
Back in the late 1970s Picador was the book imprint every young person wanted to be seen with. They did, after all, publish Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Soon they published everything else by Marquez too and everything they could find by any Latin American novelist with three names. So too did their publishing imitators, King Penguin, Flamingo, Abacus and others. Then the fashion moved to Eastern Europe and consonants were big for a while – Bruno Schulz, Josef Skvorecky, Tadeusz Borowski, Slavenka Drakulic, Ludvik Vaculic.
In a not so uncanny anticipation of Amazon’s “You liked A, therefore you might like Ab” gambit, publishers risked their cash on the fashionable wave of the time. Much of what was published was exciting or at least different from what had gone before (though there was probably too much magic realism). The only problem was that once it was gone it was gone.
It would be nice to think that someone might some day rake through the publishing ruins of the 70s and 80s and pick out a few of the now forgotten gems for republication. Gems there certainly are among the justly forgotten and the scarcely noticed. My eternal gratitude for a start to whoever “rediscovers” the great Russian Abram Terz and in particular his two satire/fables of Stalinism, The Makepeace Experiment and The Trial Begins.
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The IMRAM Irish language literature festival has just announced its 2008 programme. The theme this year is the islands and seas of Ireland and their place in the artistic imagination.
There is the Gaelic Jazz Project, fusing the ancient and the modern, moving from classic Blasket Island texts to twentieth century poetry; Béal Tuinne, Shaun Davey’s setting of Caoimhín Ó Cinnéide’s poetry to music; and in the shadow-puppet play Róisín agus an Rón, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Púca Puppets present a novel take on the legends of the seal-people, with a soundtrack from Colm Ó Snodaigh and Slavek Kwi.
IMRAM 2008 is collaborating this year with the Stranger Than Fiction documentary film festival. Special screenings of films about Tory Island, Inis Biggle and Shark Island will be accompanied by poetry, singing and music – with performers including haiku poet Siobhán Ní Ghabhann, Patsy Dan Rogers, the King of Tory, and Lillis Ó Laoire.
The festival also looks to the future, with readings featuring a new generation of writers, including Na Scríbhneoirí Óga is Úra, a dynamic group with a mission to encourage and develop emerging writers. And in a collaboration with the Irish Film Institute and Poetry Ireland on a special schools screening of Nead an Dreolín, young audiences can experience the best of modern Irish poetry in an imaginative visual context, as well as meeting some of the poets in person.
TUILLEADH EOLAIS/FURTHER INFORMATION:
Liam Carson r-phost/e-mail liamog62@mac.com
Fón/phone 01-8329594 nó 087-2912797
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