Calling all Quest Seekers to Clare County Library

The annual Library Summer Reading Scheme for children kicked off on Wednesday the 1st of July. This year’s theme is Quest Seekers and librarians throughout the county are hoping it will take young readers into a mysterious and wondrous land where they can discover the joy of reading. Children are urged to join the adventure in their local library, where young Quest Seekers will be helped along in their mission to read six books or more during July and August. Free promotional materials available as part of the scheme, will encourage them, as they read through the Summer and Clare County Library urges them to log on to the interactive Quest Seekers website www.questseekers.org.uk which will link them with top authors and illustrators, give them space to talk about their favourite books and take part in on-line Quest Seeker games and activities.

CBI/Bisto Book of the Year Awards

The 2009 Bisto Book of the Year Award 2009 was posthumously won by Siobhan Dowd for her novel Bog Child. The Eilis Dillon Award for a first children’s book was won by Mary Finn for Anila’s Journey. Kate Thompson was the proud winner of two awards, The Judges Special Recognition Award for Highway Robbery and The Bisto Honour Award for Writing, for Creature of the Night. The Bisto Honour Award for Illustration went to Oliver Jeffers for The Great Paper Caper.

Anthony Browne New Children’s Laureate in UK

The author and illustrator Anthony Browne has been appointed as Children’s Laureate in the UK. Browne says that he will campaign to raise the profile of picture books in the trade and to encourage adults as well as children to draw. He first sprang to fame with a book about a friendly gorilla, and went on to win international acclaim with Willy the Wimp, a weedy chimp who overcomes his anxieties to defeat the neighbourhood bullies. Claire Armitstead writing in The Guardian newspaper said of Browne “He's also a sharp social commentator, whose counterpoint of words and text has set new standards of sophistication in picture books”.

Killaloe Playground

A quick video showing some of the great attractions at the new playground in Killaloe which was grant-aided by Clare County Council.

County Clare on Nationwide

At the end of last year and early this year the RTE Nationwide crew came to County Clare to film a piece on the Clare Tourism Forum and tourism in County Clare. The piece will be aired on Sunday evening, 5th of July, at 6.30pm, on RTE1. Interviewees include Richard Nagle, Chairperson of the Clare Tourism Forum; Birgitta Curtin, Burren Smokehouse; Michael McNamara, Senior Hurling Manager; Shane Gilmore, Sculptor; Paul Madden, Managing Director Temple Gate Hotel; Marty Morrissey, RTE; Katherine Webster, Cliffs of Moher Visitor Centre and Maureen Cleary, Clare Tourism Forum. Tune in and don’t forget to spread the word to your friends and family. Hopefully the piece will entice people to spend some time in beautiful County Clare. See also http://www.clare.ie/

Clare Hurling - The Glory Years 1995-1999

with music from Stockton's Wing

Orange Prize 2009

This year's Orange prize for the best novel written by a woman was won by a writer regarded as one of the greatest living novelists - Marilynne Robinson. Her novel Home explores the themes of family relationships and redemption. Fi Glover, chair of the judging panel said "This year's Orange Prize winner has a luminous quality to it that has drawn all of the judges to a unanimous decision. The profound nature of the writing stood out, as has the ability of writer to draw the reader into a world of hope expectation, misunderstanding, love and kindness". Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping (1981), chosen as one of the Observer’s 100 greatest novels of all time, and Gilead (2004) which won the Pulitzer prize. She was one of three American writers shortlisted for the £30,000 award. One of the favourites had been Ellen Feldman's Scottsboro, a fictional account of a real scandal when nine black defendants were farcically tried in Alabama in 1931 for the rape of two white girls. The other books were Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else, about the mad but brilliant inventor of AC electricity, Nikola Tesla; Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness, a first novel written about a man's descent into Alzheimer's; Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday about a woman who never celebrates her birthday and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows which traces the stories of three families from the nuclear detonation in Nagasaki in 1945 to post-9/11 Afghanistan.

Ulysses on Twitter

Two Ulysses enthusiasts, Ian Bogost from the Georgia Institute of Technology and colleague Ian McCarthy, have recreated a chapter from James Joyce's 1922 novel on Twitter in an attempt to use the site in a culturally interesting way. They chose chapter 10, Wandering Rock, which is famous for showing the interlocking events of 19 characters walking through central Dublin on their daily business. Bogost and McCarthy registered 54 of the novel's characters as Twitter users and adapted the chapter in a large series of 140-character-or-less first-person statements, using a specially created software to automate a performance. On June 16, Bloomsday, the day the action in the novel takes place in 1904, these characters all sent tweets about what they were doing at the correct fictional times

Dolphin exhibition at Courthouse Gallery

The Courthouse Gallery, Parliament Street, Ennistymon presents Jan Ploeg's ‘Dolphin Address’, a photography and video exhibition running from June 17th to July 12th 2009. The official opening takes place on Friday 19th June at 8 pm by Dr. Simon Berrow, founder of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group and Project officer of the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation. The exhibition shows 26 large, mounted photographs (48 x 36 cm) of the dolphin Dusty, taken just under the waters’ surface, where the sunlight is still strong making her appear as being clad in a golden shroud. In addition, three computers will be set up where visitors will be able to view hundreds of photographs and underwater videos or log on to the artist’s website (www.janploeg.nl). Jan Ploeg is an artist taught by nature, who worked in wood between 1976 and 1999 and started specializing in dolphins and whales since 1986. He first came to Ireland in 1992 and swam with Fungi and in 2002 started swimming with Dusty. He has since developed the ‘WaterWing’, written a book in his native Dutch about Fungi the Dolphin, developed toys for Dolphins in a Dutch dolphinarium and recently published ‘Dolphin Address’ featuring Dolphin photography and outlining his experiences with these animals.

Samuel Johnson shortlist 2009

The shortlist for this year's BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was announced on May 22nd. The prize, now in its 11th year, is billed as "the richest non-fiction prize in the UK". However, due to the credit crunch, the prize money, which was previously worth £30,000 to the winner, has dropped to £20,000. The winner will be announced on 30th June on a 50-minute special of The Culture Show.
The shortlisted books are:
Lords of Finance: the bankers who broke the world by Liaquat Ahamed
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Leviathan by Philip Hoare
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar