Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Caomhnú Literary Festival

Cavan Arts Office is organising the Caomhnú Literary Festival which takes place from 5th to 8 February. Full details are here. Highlights will include readings and workshops by Joseph O'Connor, Noel Monahan, Claire Keegan, Heather Brett, Kieran Furey, Billy Roche and Michael Harding.

Heather Brett is facilitator of the LitLab group of which I am a member and both Noel Monahan and Michael Harding gave excellent workshops to the group last term. There will also be a reading by members of the LitLab group on Saturday 7th at 5pm.

There is also a Caomhnú National Poetry Competition and Caomhnú Crannog Bookshop National Short Story Competition. Details on the website. The prizes in both competitions are 1st Prize €200, 2nd Prize, €100, 3rd Prize €70. The final date for entries is Friday 16th January 2009.


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Nice to see that Sebastian Barry has won the Costa Prize for Fiction for his novel The Secret Scripture. This was one of the few novels I read last year and I enjoyed it. The poetry winner was Adam Foulds for his debut poetry book The Broken Word. Described as a verse novella it deals with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Times review here. More from the Guardian here.

These two and the other category winners go forward for the Costa Book of the Year Award which will be announced in two weeks.

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