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News and Events
Mining the Past
The second event in the School of English Reading Series features historical novelist Paul Lynch, author of the famine novel, Grace, which won this year's Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award and our very own (for now!) Carys Davies, the current Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow - sponsored by Munster Literature Centre and Cork City Council - whose novel, West, is an exquisite historical fiction gem set in Frontier America in the early 1800s.
The reading takes place on Tuesday, November 20, in the Creative Zone, Boole Library @ 6.30pm. Admission free and all are welcome!
Paul Lynch to read with Carys Davies
Irish Novel of the Year award winner Paul Lynch . . . coming to UCC. Photograph: Irish Times
The second event in the 2018/19 School of English Reading Series will feature two readers, novelist Paul Lynch, above, and 2018 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow, Carys Davies.
The reading takes place on Tuesday, November 20, Creative Zone Boole Library at 6.30pm.
Paul Lynch - https://paullynchwriter.com/ - is the author of three novels – Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow and most recently, Grace, a coming-of-age novel set against the unfolding tragedy of the Famine, which won this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/grace-by-paul-lynch-wins-kerry-group-irish-novel-of-the-year-award-1.3513627
Paul has been shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) and has been nominated several times for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards.
He will be joined on the podium by Carys Davies, the 2018 Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Fellow, who has been teaching on the MA in Creative Writing since September as well as mentoring local writers. - https://www.carysdavies.net/. The fellowship is sponsored by Cork city council through the Munster Literature Centre. https://www.munsterlit.ie/.
She is the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, and a Northern Writers' Award.
Her first novel, West, published earlier this year, is an epic-in-miniature, set in Frontier America in 1815 and features an unlikely hero, Cy Bellman, a mule farmer who goes on a quest to find the bones of an extinct monster.
The next reading in the series will feature novelist Donal Ryan and poet Colette Bryce, winner of the 2018 Pigott Prize, on Tuesday, January 22, 2019.
Practising what she preaches
Warm congratulations to Rachel Andrews who's been announced as one of the winners of the 2018 Hubert Butler Essay Prize. https://www.hubertbutleressayprize.com/2018-winners. Rachel guest lectures on the long-form essay for the Creative Writing MA's Writing for Media module.
Rachel is a writer and journalist based in Cork. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Longreads, the London Review of Books, Brick literary journal, the Dublin Review and the Stinging Fly. She has been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize (2018), and for the Notting Hill Essay Prize (2017).
Culture Ireland lecture series
Director of Creative Writing, Dr Eibhear Walshe, will be giving three lectures Stateside this week. Tomorrow, October 23, he will be speaking on "The Other Wilde Trial" relating to Oscar Wilde's father, a subject on which he drew for his first novel, The Diary of Mary Travers, at Boston College - https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/sites/irish/events.html
On Thursday, October 25, he will lecture on Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her links to espionage during World War II - see https://www.wellesley.eduevents . Also this week he will be lecturing on the short stories of Carys Davies, the 2018 Frank O'Connor International Fellow at UCC, at Emerson College. The events are co-sponsored by Culture Ireland.