I’m not to going to say too much about this, as Patrick says it so well himself. If you love books, you should listen to this; it’s his speech on winning the Carnegie medal for ‘Monsters of Men’ (an excellent conclusion to a brilliant trilogy – I’ll get to posting something on it later). He’s an excellent speaker, and…
Judging by my last write-up on Peter Falk, and on this one, I’ve really got to get my posts out quicker. On Friday, the 1st of July (yes, that’s over a week ago), Maedhbh and I were in Trim to take part in an event for the Trim Swift Festival. The festival celebrates the life, works and the legacy…
Any regular viewer of ‘Columbo’ waited for that moment, those words: ‘Just one more thing . . .’. The moment you knew the scruffy, shambling, diffident detective was about to nail his suspect to the wall with a damning piece of evidence. It normally came after a drawn-out process, as the murderer went from being dismissive of this rumpled,…
Conor Kostick is a good friend and the author of the excellent ‘Avatar Chronicles’. To celebrate the launch of ‘Edda’, the third book in the series, Conor’s doing a ‘blog tour’ – a series of pieces on different blogs, finishing up on mine. Today, I’m posting a video of the two of us having a chat about ‘Edda’ and…
It might be going a bit overboard to call it ‘a revolution’, but here’s an interesting idea, as featured on the Mail Online site. Hodder have imported a new publishing format from the Netherlands. Basically, it’s a paperback novel you read with the spine turned horizontally, with the pages in landscape position. The paper is extremely thin – based…
I spent the 11th to the 13th of June in a place called Saint Malo, on the northern coast of Britanny, in France. I was there to take part in a fantastic book and film festival, but used it as an excuse to get a family holiday in as well. The festival is entitled ‘Etonnants Voyageurs’ – which loosely…
In its ongoing crusade to make as much of the world’s information available online (an act that is not entirely altruistic), Google have teamed up with the British Library to release 250,000 books online, from the library’s stock. ‘The Telegraph’ reports that the books will cover the years from 1700 to 1870, so the copyright issues that Google has…
I’m only just back from France, having attended the Etonnants Voyageurs festival in St Malo, and then gone on to take a week with the family on the west coast of Britanny. I’ll do separate posts on those two, when I get a chance. Unfortunately, I didn’t win either of the awards I was up for; the Prix Imaginales…
I’m just finishing up two separate residencies for Poetry Ireland, in primary schools in Drogheda and Balbriggan. These two particular courses are what are known as Development Education residencies – all of which have some kind of social justice theme. The theme this year has been ‘Starvation’. I run a project that produces a collection of illustrated stories at…
I read an article in ‘The Irish Times’ recently that told of the massive advance for a two-book deal for first-time novellist, Kathleen MacMahon. In the article, the deal – with its £600,000 advance – for This Is How It Ends and a follow-up book, is hailed as: ‘brilliant news for debut novelists. It’s proof that there’s an appetite…