MENTORS
Our mentors in poetry will be MARY O’DONNELL and MARK ROPER. CARLO GEBLER will be a mentor for nonfiction. Fiction mentors will be announced at a later date. Please watch this Web site for breaking news.
MARY O’DONNELL is a poet, novelist, translator and critic. In recognition of her outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland, she is one of only 200 living Irish artists invited by peer selection to be members of Aosdana. She has published four volumes of poetry and three novels. Her work has been published in literary journals in Ireland, the UK and the USA, and anthologized in collections in Ireland and abroad.
MARK ROPER is noted throughout Ireland as an experienced teacher of creative writing. He is presently working in adult education in Waterford and Kilkenny. His poetry collections include The Hen Ark (Peterloo), which won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection; Catching the Light (Peterloo); and The Home Fire (Abbey Press) and his latest collection, Whereabouts (Abbey Press). He is also a former editor of Poetry Ireland.
CARLO GEBLER is the author of The Eleventh Summer and How to Murder a Man, as well as novels for children such as Caught on a Train (a Bisto Merit Award winner) and August 44 (nominated for a Bisto Award), among others. He was born in Dublin and brought up in London. His memoir, Father and I, is highly acclaimed. A reviewer for New Statesman Books of the Year, called it “A spare, lean, haunting account…Written with Gebler’s trademark no-frills prose, and relentless attention to the detail of a child’s life as it is lived, this memoir also provides a vivid evocation of Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and 1970.”
Gebler also directs television documentaries. His film about children in north Belfast, "Put to the Test," won the Royal Television Society award in 1999 in the best regional documentary category. In 2006, he was Arts Council Writer Fellow at Trinity College.
Other mentors for nonfiction and fiction will be announced later.
SPEAKERS
Speakers in the June residency will include DAVID BUTLER, SEAN HARDIE, CLAIRE KEEGAN, and possibly former fiction mentor ANNE ENRIGHT, the winner of the Man Booker Award for 2007.
DAVID BUTLER, a Joyce scholar, will lead our visit through Dublin on Bloomsday, June 16. He is the former Education Officer at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, where he gave lectures and workshops on Joyce and other Irish writers, such as Samuel Beckett. His book, An Aid to Reading Ulysses, is highly praised.
Butler’s has won numerous prizes for his fiction and poetry. His collection of poetry, Via Crucis, was runner up for the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2002. Other poetry awards have included the Ted McNulty, the Brendan Kennelly, the Golden Pen, and the Feile Filiochta International Award.
SEAN HARDIE spent ten years as a current affairs producer with BBC-TV covering assignments in Europe, the Middle East and North America, before moving to comedy, where he co-created and co-produced the successful BBC satire series “Not the Nine O’Clock News.” He has many TV credits as producer, writer and director, including a number of films for John Cleese’s Video Arts Company. Since 1986, he has worked primarily as a writer.
Hardie has published three well-received novels: The Last Supper published in the USA as Table for Five; Right Connections and Till the Fat Lady Sings.
CLAIRE KEEGAN has won many awards for her short stories: the William Trevor Prize, the Kilkenny Prize, the Martin Healy Award, the William Naughton Prize, the Olive Cook Award, the Alligham Prize, the Tom Gallon Award and the Macaulay Fellowship. She was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2000.
Keegan’s first collection, Antartica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The critic, Declan Kibred, has called her the true successor to John McGahern: “a writer already touched by greatness.” (Irish Times) Her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was recently published by Faber & Faber. She is presently the Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. |
