The book starts here
The season of literary festivals kicks off with Mountains to Sea DLR. Donal O’Donoghue sets the scene
And so it begins. Mountains to Sea DLR, the book festival that sweeps from the cafés, theatres and bookshops of Dublin to shining Irish sea, runs from March 28 to 31 and is the first major literary event in the 2019 calendar. It is an auspicious start with a number of heavyweights weighing in for the four-day event including husband and wife Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd teaming up to talk about ‘ The Writing Life’, Tracey Thorn giving us everything and the girl with the second volume of her well-regarded memoir and Stephen Rea brings Seamus Heaney’s Aeneid VI to bloody, brilliant life.
The theme of this year’s Mountains to Sea is ‘Speaking with Strangers’, a timely frame for these dark days of wall-building, Brexiteers and extremist atrocities. Addressing the notion of the stranger or outsider or foreigner or alien or whatever you wish to tag it is a literature (fiction, poetry and nonfiction) that not only attempts to make sense of recent history but to offer alternative voices and visions to the blinkered ones that are increasingly clogging the public forum. In this respect, the festival’s non-fiction strand addresses the Age of Anger (with Pakaj Mishra) and Diarmaid Ferriter is joined by film-maker Nuala O’Connor and novelist Eoin McNamee to talk about why the border between Ireland and NI matters. Elsewhere Sinéad Gleeson’s luminous new collections of essays, Constellations, will be celebrated in the company of the author, host Maeve Higgins and singer-songwriter, Maria Doyle Kennedy. Tracey Thorn is on Another Planet, talking about her brilliant music career and stage fright, Laureate for Irish Fiction, Sebastian Barry, explores nature and the natural world in his writing. There is new poetry from Bernard O’Donoghue, Mary O’Donnell, Moya Cannon and John Kelly and a full programme for families and children including Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood.
But steel yourself, for this festival is just the first of many over the coming months, with Cúirt International Festival of Culture next on the lit list (April 8 to April 14), the International Dublin Literature Festival rolls into town on May 17, then there’s the Listowel Writers’ Week (May 29 to June 2), Hinterland in Kells (June 27 to 30) and on and on. More info at mountainstosea.ie