Dublin-The International Festival of Authors is nothing if not catholic. It's an ideal place to catch a glimpse of what's going on in dozens of literatures around the world that Chapters/Indigo don't bother stocking.
But this year's focus on Ireland - both the republic and the north - is the largest national focus the festival has ever had, thanks to guest curator Colm Toibin, who picked the 16 most interesting authors working in Hiberno-English today. They're coming to Toronto among the usual panoply of Argentines, Chileans, Danes, Iraqis, Israelis, Nigerians and Swedes, from Oct. 22 until Nov. 1, to read and panellize.
"It's a part of our ongoing commitment to bringing the best of world literature to Toronto," says the festival's director, Geoffrey Taylor, who brought on Toibin as an experiment this year, "and an awful lot of it is coming from Ireland."
It'll give us a glimpse of what's going on right now in this exceptionally rich literature culture, an island with a population about equal to the Greater Toronto Area, but which has given us four Nobel laureates (if you don't count Eugene O'Neill) and four Booker winners (if you don't count Thomas Keneally). What is it about Ireland? Is it something in the water?
I sit across a small table from John Banville - one of those Booker winners, in 2005 - in the bar of the O'Callaghan-Davenport hotel in Dublin. Read on
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