High profile Irish and international literary figures will participate in the 2011 Ennis Book Club Festival, details of which were announced on the 12th of January. In association with Clare County Library, the three-day programme of events is expected to attract hundreds of Book Club members and book lovers from all over Ireland and the UK to the County Clare capital from 4th to 6th March 2011. The Festival programme features author visits, readings, lectures and workshops in various venues around Ennis. It also includes the ‘Irish Book Club of the Year Award’ and a professional development workshop for library staff. This event on ‘Marketing Strategies for Libraries’ is free to all library staff nationwide. It will be presented by Nancy Dowd, co-author of Bite-Sized Marketing: realistic solutions for the overworked librarian and Director of Marketing for the New Jersey State Library. The workshop takes place on Friday 4th March at 2.30 pm. For further information, or to book a place, phone 087 226 2259 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 087 226 2259 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or email frances.ogorman@clarelibrary.ie Among the Irish contributors to the festival will be Anne Enright, Booker Prize-winning author; Pauline McLynn, stage and screen actor and author of eight bestselling novels; Peter Sheridan, playwright, film and theatre director, and recipient of the Rooney Prize for Literature; Paul Murray, Irish author of Skippy Dies which has been selected as the third best fiction book of the year by Time magazine; Eamonn Sweeney, journalist and author of Down Down Deeper and Down: Ireland in the 70s and 80s, and the bestselling Road to Croker; David Norris, Senator and Joycean scholar; Dr Eibhear Walshe, author of Cissie’s Abattoir and senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork; and John Curran, author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks.
International contributors include Doug Stanton, US author of Horse Soldiers and New York Times bestseller In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors; Blake Morrison, former literary editor of The Observer and the Independent on Sunday, Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, and author of The Last Weekend and Things My Mother Never Told Me; and David J. Lynch, senior writer with Bloomberg News, former war correspondent, and author of When The Luck Of The Irish Ran Out: The World’s Most Resilient Country and Its Struggle to Rise Again.
There will also be poetry readings by Vona Groarke and Tom Conaty, while well known broadcaster Marie Louise O'Donnell will be choosing ‘10 Books You Should Read’. Elsewhere, the Festival will feature a Clare Youth Theatre performance of ‘Ex Libris’, and the launch by the Clare Three-legged Stool Poets of the late Brendan O’Byrne’s poetry collection, Reality the Graveyard of Dreams. The young winners of The Clare Champion’s short story writing competition will also be reading their work. Clare County Librarian Helen Walsh said that this year’s three-day programme of events promises to be as exciting and wide-ranging as the previous four festivals. ‘The numbers attending the Festival has grown year-on-year and we expect hundreds of readers from all around the country to travel to Ennis this March’, she explained. Hope you can join us!
Tickets for all events will be on sale in early February. Further festival information is available from (web) www.ennisbookclubfestival.com, (t) www.twitter.com/ebcf, (e) info@ennisbookclubfestival.com and (t) 087 226 2259 and 087 9723647
No comments:
Post a Comment