Posted in Interviews, Ireland, New Yorkers, Novelists, Politics, tagged Brooklyn, Colm Toibin on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, April 25, 2009
IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his [...]
Posted in Ireland, New Yorkers, News, Poetry, Poets, tagged Philip Schultz on April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, [...]
Posted in Interviews, Ireland, News, Novelists, tagged John Banville, Paris Review on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.
Posted in 1, Features, Ireland, Poets, Visual Arts on April 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me [...]
Posted in Features, Ireland, Poetry, Poets on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: “Heaney at 70″, an Irish Times Special Report to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Seamus Heaney
April 13, 2009
WHEN FIRST he spoke to America, Seamus Heaney did not soften the edge of his words. In fact, in his first major interview with an American newspaper, Heaney suggested that it was a certain softness in [...]
Posted in Interviews, New Yorkers, Novelists, Visual Arts on April 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, April 11, 2009
THERE’S A HENRY JAMES story which set Leanne Shapton’s heart thumping even before she’d read it, and when you look at the title – The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – it’s not hard to see why. James’s earliest ghost story was published in 1868, and when Shapton [...]
