THE PROGRAMME for the 2012 Cúirt International Festival of Literature will be launched in the Hotel Meyrick, Eyre Square, at 6pm this coming Tuesday.
The festival runs from Monday April 23 to Sunday 29 and wil feature readings, talks, theatre, and launches.
American poet Billy Collins is among the writers who will be appearing at the 27th Cúirt festival. Collins was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is also a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as being the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. His books include Ballistics (2008 ), The Trouble with Poetry (2005 ), Picnic, Lightning (1998 ), and The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988 ).
Also reading will be Welsh born Simon Van Booy, an exciting talent who is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, Love Begins in Winter (winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award ) and the novel, Everything Beautiful Began After.
He is the editor of three philosophy books and his essays have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian, and he has a monthly column in ELLE Men (China ).
The New York Times said of his short stories: “Incurable romantics will savour Van Booy’s tender Maupassant-like fables” while Time Out New York said he “captures youthful innocence...and the melancholy that accompanies its loss so well.”
American author Amy Bloom will also be coming to Cúirt. She has written two novels, three collections of short stories, and is a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent novel, Away, was an epic story about a Russian immigrant. Her new collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, is out now.
More Magazine has called her fiction “densely detailed, wryly funny, and provocative” while the New Yorker said she “gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.”
Among the Irish authors who will read at Cúirt will be leading Irish novelist John Banville, best known for such acclaimed works as The Book of Evidence and The Sea.
The 2012 Cúirt programme also includes a range of discussion events centred around the theme of ‘Communication and Language’ and how readers engage with and absorb literature.
Multimedia events, theatre, and visual art also form part of the festival programme this year. Some of the special events will include an exhibition in Norman Villa Gallery by artist Brian Bourke inspired by the work of William Blake, and a live radio broadcast by RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena on the Friday of the festival.
Local theatre company Mephisto will bring to life Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, while the BA Connect Drama NUI Galway will perform PERVE by Stacey Gregg under the direction of Andrew Flynn. Galway Youth Theatre will also have daily showings of Breathing Corpses by Laura Wade in Nuns Island Theatre.
This year will also see the festival expand its master class programme with the addition of three further workshops covering drama, memoir, and assembling a manuscript (poetry ).
Full programme information will be available online from Tuesday March 13 at www.cuirt.ie and bookings for all events can be made after this date through the Town Hall Theatre on www.tht.ie or 091 - 569777.
