John Corigliano, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2009
WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of [...]

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Mostly There Was Silence: Donald Hall, Poet

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, October 10, 2009
EARLY ON AN October Saturday the landscape around Eagle Pond Farm, near Wilmot in the state of New Hampshire, is astonishing to drive through. This is the famous New England fall in all its glory, and it is almost too beautiful for words. But only almost: “These [...]

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Never Ask Me Why: Paul Auster, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, September 5, 2009
WELL, MR AUSTER. Tell me all about yourself.” Quite a way to start a conversation. But then, if you’re Samuel Beckett, you can probably get away with any conversation-starter you like. And it goes without saying that you can lean across the table to pilfer a cigarette [...]

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From the Lake: Garrison Keillor

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, July 25, 2009
IN THE ELEVATOR, I’m sceptical. He can’t always talk in that voice, can he? At 11am, in the middle of a busy two-day trip to New York, at the end of another long season of the radio show which requires him to riff and revel and recite [...]

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An Irishman in America: Colm Tóibín

 
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 [...]

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An Interview with Philip Schultz, Poet

 
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, [...]

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John Banville: The Art of Fiction, No. 200

 
 
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.

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DLR Poetry Now 2009

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 [...]

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Made in America: Seamus Heaney at 70

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 [...]

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Lived-in Lots: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts

 
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 [...]

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