READINGS, ART exhibitions, tree planting, and a plaque unveiling will all take place as part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature from April 23 to 28.
To get things moving, this evening at 6pm in the Town Hall Theatre, are the opening of two exhibitions. The Cutting Edge by Ciaran Murphy is a series of papercut illustrations inspired by nursery rhymes and the darker side of fairy tales. Crossing is a collaboration between Austrian artist Manfred Url and Austrian journalist, writer and film maker Norbert Prettenthaler.
The 2013 Cúirt Over The Edge Showcase Reading is in the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday April 25 at 4.30pm, with Dearbhaile Houston, Damian Cunniffe, and Eimear Ryan, along with the Cúirt New Writing Prize fiction category winner Hugo Kelly.
The winners of the Cúirt New Writing Prize will be formally announced today at 12 noon in Tigh Neachtains. The winner in the poetry section is Galwegian Caoilinn Hughes, now living in New Zealand, who will be unable to make it to Cúirt.
Eimear Ryan’s fiction has appeared in The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, and New Irish Writing. She won the Sean Dunne Young Writers’ Award 2011, the Hennessy Award for First Fiction 2009, and the 2011 Over The Edge New Writer of The Year.
Abbeyknockmoy’s Damian Cunniffe was longlisted for the 2011 Fish Publishing International Short Story Prize, the Ink Tears Prize, and was joint winner of the Lonely Voices Short Story Introductions competition run by the Irish Writers Centre.
Dearbhaile Houston won the Seán Uí Riordáin prize for poetry in the Oireachtas na Gaeilge Literary Competition 2011.
The MC will be Susan Millar DuMars. Admission is free.
Also on Thursday 25 but at 11am in Terryland Forest Park, there will be a tree planting ceremony as par of Cúirt. From this year on, writers will plant trees as part of the annual festival. The planting will take place in the Forest Park beside the Black Box Theatre, on the Dyke Road.
Cúirt will also continue its annual placement of literary plaques around Galway. This year’s plaque will be unveiled outside The Connacht Tribune, Lombard Street, on Thursday 25 at 12.30pm. The plaque will feature a poem by Gerald Dawe.
