Brian Keenan to Open Scariff Harbour Festival

World recognised author, university teacher and former hostage, east Belfast born Brian Keenan will officially open the 6th Scariff Harbour Festival on Friday 1st August 2008 at 6.30pm, maintaining the festival’s well established links with Northern Ireland. The festival has been promoting links between communities on both sides of the border at political, cultural and community levels since its inception in 2003. He will also read from his soon to be published memoir at Scariff Public Library on Saturday 2nd August at 3pm. Brian Keenan recently returned to the Lebanon, a place he came to know and love despite the political and religious complexities and the ravages brought to bear on the fraught middle eastern country. Accompanied by his wife Audrey and boys Jack & Cal, his visit to the country where he was taken hostage was made into a film documentary and broadcast on BBC television. It was prompted by an inner need to assure his sons that the Lebanon was not an evil place because evil does not endure and to instil in them a passion for issues of justice, freedom and happiness. Two years into his abduction, in the unknown underworld of Beirut, his lone nightmare was to take a new and fortuitous twist. British journalist, John McCarthy was kidnapped on his way to the airport having just completed a news feature on Brian’s abduction for World Wide Television News. They were to share cells for the remainder of their captivity, an experience that was to profoundly impact their lives and subsequently led them to co-write a travel book ‘Between Extremes – A Journey Beyond Imagination’ On the 24th August 1990, Brian was released from captivity and handed over by the Syrian Foreign Ministry to the Irish Ambassador, Declan Connolly. Brian Keenan is author of ‘An Evil Cradling’, a best selling graphic account of his hostage experience; ‘Turlough’ his first novel which brings together his time of captivity and the personal life and loves of the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan; ‘Four Quarters of Light, A Journey Through Alaska’ – which he felt called to undertake having read Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’ in his childhood. He is currently finalising a memoir with the working title of ‘I’ll Tell me Ma”.