Thirteen Unknowns Contend for ₤60,000
The inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry, fiction, and drama is looking to give ₤60,000 (about $100,000) for the work(s) of an author younger than thirty. Works up for contention are Hick Laird’s novel Utterly Monkey and his poetry collection To a Fault. Other works in contention are Escape Routes for Beginners by Kira Cochrane, An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson, The Amnesia Clinc by James Scudamore, Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel, Playing Mercy by Matthew David Scott, Where They Were Missed by Lucy Caldwell, Outside Valentine by Liza Ward, No Fireworks by Rodge Glass, Fresh Apples by Rachel Tresize, Taming the Best by Emily Maguire, Sayonara Bar by Susan Baker, and Unfeeling by Ian Holding. The authors are from Australia, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the United States.
Glimpse of “Terrorist”
The Guardian is running an extract from John Updike’s Terrorist, where an alienated teenager find refuge in religion.
How Deep the Roots of Belfast’s Literature
“In September 1963 Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley visited the County Down grave of…Louis MacNeice…Longley, writing recently in the introduction to a selection of MacNeice’s poems, recalled that as they ‘dawdled between the graves’ all three then-unpublished poets were silently ‘contemplating an elegy.’ …” That’s the start of Nicholas Wroe essay about the literary traditions of Belfast.
