Dublin Writers Festival

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Rebellion and rites of passage in the South Seas link two vivid tales of survival from two very different historical perspectives."

Admission €10.00 / €8.00. "Multi-million selling author. Famed recluse. Erstwhile correspondent of Jackie Onassis. Contemporary cohort of Johnny Depp. Author, playwright, artist, farmer, and all-round Irish icon, J. P. Donleavy is a one-man literary cult surrounded by a tantalising mythology. ... (more)The young American-Irish émigré was first launched into literary orbit with his debut bestseller The Ginger Man in 1955. Chronicling the drunken exploits of a rowdy young American in post-war Dublin, it cemented the author’s cult credentials and has since sold more than 45 million copies in two dozen languages. Post Ginger Man, Donleavy’s prodigious output boasts novels, plays, short stories and autobiography, including The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966) and A Fairytale of New York (1979).

This special retrospective looks back on a remarkable career from Dublin’s post-war creative Bohemia to fevered speculation of an imminent Ginger Man screen adaptation care of Laurence Dunmore and Mr Depp."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "A powerful sense of community and identity links two highly distinct literary visions. Wayne Johnston’s narratives are shaped by the rugged landscape of his native Newfoundland. His breakthrough novel – 1998’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams – sealed his reputation ... (more)as a bravura literary force. This breathtaking portrait of a man who craves worldly significance ‘commensurate with the greatness of the landscape itself’ – was emblematic of the Newfoundland experience. Its sequel, 2007’s The Custodian of Paradise – recaptures the luminous grace of this sprawling epic.

Just as Johnston explores the relationship between private lives and history, Glenn Patterson's Belfast novels pit the individual against the public life of the nation. From his multi-award-winning debut Burning Your Own (1988) and The International (1999) – both set on the cusp of Northern Ireland's Troubles – to Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his non-fiction, Patterson traces the links between identity, memory and history, testing and subverting the ‘given narratives’ of his native city.

A sublime meeting of literary minds from opposite sides of the Atlantic."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Do human beings create and shape their own destinies and identities? Or do events in extremis define our outcomes? Set against an epoch-defining moment, two gripping new novels probe the ambiguities of human action."

Admission €10.00/€8.00. "Since the Celtic Tiger first roared back in the early 1990s, Ireland’s economic upturn has transformed the lives of many. But has this newfound prosperity also changed our core values? And if so, what does this say about us as a society? Was the Ireland of old a purer, ... (more)simpler and therefore kinder society, or is this simply the worst kind of nostalgia?

Lending its collective experience and estimable insight to this timely debate is a heavyweight panel of Irish commentators: Independent Senator, Ivana Bacik; Roy Foster, the most eminent and distinguished of Irish historians; Alan Gilsenan, Ireland’s most prolific documentary maker and David McWilliams, economist, broadcaster and writer.

Together, this prodigious line-up of cultural movers and shakers unpicks the moral and social fabric of 21st-century Irish society."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Join the 2008 winner (announced from this prestigious shortlist on Thursday 12 June) for a very special Dublin Writers Festival event, exclusive and hot off the press!"

Admission €10.00/€8.00. In association with Irish PEN. " Shakespearean. Pinteresque. Stoppardian. Once your surname becomes an adjective, you've pretty much hit cultural Nirvana. Sir Tom Stoppard is one of the world's most celebrated and influential playwrights, his distinctive oeuvre characterised ... (more)by big ideas, coruscating wordplay and passionate humanism.

Stoppard’s 1967 breakthrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead set the benchmark, earning the playwright a Tony on Broadway and paving the way for international success on stage, screen and radio – from Jumpers (72) to Rock 'n' Roll (06); from Brazil (85) to the BAFTA winning Shakespeare in Love (98).

Describing himself, with characteristic humility, as a ‘timid libertarian’, Stoppard is in fact a tireless campaigner for civil liberties and human rights. As a vice president of English PEN, he is an ardent champion of freedom of expression. Help celebrate a remarkable career, as Dublin Writers Festival gets up close and personal with one of the seminal figures of 20th and 21st-century British culture."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Two of Dublin’s most respected voices share the stage and their literary heritage in this double-header of contemporary Irish poetry."

Admission €10.00/€8.00. "How does the novelist refract, through the haze of memory, the secret history of a life long-lived? How does the past hold the present in its thrall? And how do these recollections help shape our understanding of our own lives? Two new novels explore this fertile terrain ... (more)with compelling results."

Admission €14.00. " Join Kathy Lette for coffee, croissants and a side order of breezy Aussie charm, as the best-selling author of Dead Sexy, Foetal Attraction, Girls’ Night Out and Nip ‘N’ Tuck invites you to this year’s high-fibre, calorie controlled (yeah right!) Dublin Writers Festival ... (more)brunch.

Kathy Lette first achieved succéss de scandale as a suburban Sydney teen with her proto-feminist surf scene novel Puberty Blues (1979). After several years as a singer, newspaper columnist and sitcom writer, she returned to the day job, unleashing a string of best-selling novels, plays and film adaptations, including her big-screen breakthrough Mad Cows starring Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel. Her plays include Grommits, Wet Dreams and Perfect Mismatch. Her new novel To Love, Honour and Betray is another tour de force of sex, satire and jeux d’esprit.

For the latest slice of fast-talking, pun-laden modern angst from the queen of zeitgeist comedy, please tuck in!"

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Lola has every reason to be interested in who Paddy de Courcy is marrying – because although she’s his girlfriend, she definitely isn’t the bride-to-be. Grace – a journalist – wants the inside story on the de Courcy engagement and thinks Lola holds the key. Grace’s ... (more)sister, Marnie – Paddy’s first love – still holds a flame. And what of the future Mrs de Courcy? Four very different women. One awfully charming man. And the dark secret that binds them all."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "The work of many writers is shaped by their homeland – the history, the politics, the myths and the collective memories. To what degree does national identity inform a writer’s narrative style and thematic resource? Or is the very notion of a ‘national writing’ too ... (more)narrow a definition in the global cultural landscape?"

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Two chilling investigations into deception, cruelty and the compromise of law lay bare the dark heart of the US imperial machine."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Absent fathers, family secrets and the tidal pull of childhood memory: family dynamics are rarely far from the surface in the latest novels from Linn Ullmann and Esther Freud. Perhaps not surprising given their respective pedigrees: Ullmann is daughter of Ingmar Bergmann ... (more)and Liv Ullmann; Freud is daughter of Lucian and great-granddaughter of Sigmund."

Admission €10.00/€8.00. "At its best, the short story form is an elegant and precise distillation of the human experience. This exclusive double-header sees two of its most celebrated exponents come together in one unmissable event."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "Frank McGuinness is joined by American-Irish poet Thomas Lynch for an intimate and evocative celebration of the poet’s art."

Admission €8.00/€6.00. "With old enemies power-sharing in Belfast, peace would seem to have finally settled on the people and politics of Northern Ireland. But surely peace can only endure when the dead – over 3000 in the four-decade-long Troubles – can finally be laid to rest.

Susan McKay’s ... (more)new book Bear in Mind These Dead gives voice to those thousands – many killed in vicious spirals of tit-for-tat violence, and all-toooften overlooked in the political histories.

Catherine McCartney’s Walls of Silence is the disquieting account of her family’s battle for justice and retribution following the brutal murder of her brother Robert, and the subsequent cover-up.

My Father’s Watch – told in collaboration with writer Carlo Gébler – recounts the tragic story of Patrick Maguire, the youngest of the Maguire Seven, falsely imprisoned in connection with the 1974 IRA bombings of two Guildford pubs.

In this special event, McKay, McCartney, Maguire and Gébler look beyond the politics to the personal tragedies that, for many, have defined The Troubles: the injustices, the grief, and, where possible, the reconciliation born out of forgiveness.

Powerful, poignant and provocative debate."

Admission €10.00/€8.00. " Israeli novelist, essayist and political commentator David Grossman has won international acclaim for his writing including the Emet Prize, the Premio Grinzane and Premio Mondelo. He is the author of seven novels and two groundbreaking works of journalism, The Yellow Wind ... (more) and Sleeping on a Wire, acclaimed yet controversial studies of the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In 2003 a collection of articles chronicling the escalating violence in the Middle East was published as Death As a Way of Life. Yet for Grossman this turmoil does not determine all. Though set against the broad strokes of political conflict, his novels and stories are intimate and often sensuous explorations of the innermost refuge of the human psyche.

This exclusive Dublin visit is a rare opportunity to explore the work of a major contemporary voice on the global literary scene."

Admission €12.00/€10.00. "The scenario: Take one best-selling crime writer – Ian Rankin. Ask another major player in the genre – novelist and screenwriter Colin Bateman – to take the reins. Add some enlightened conversation, intriguing lines of enquiry and a few trade secrets. The verdict? ... (more)A one-off contemporary crime classic.

When Ian Rankin’s world-weary Scottish sleuth John Rebus took his final bow in last year’s swansong Exit Music, it marked the end of an era in British crime writing. Like P.D. James’s Dalgliesh, Ruth Rendell’s Wexford and Colin Dexter’s Morse, Rankin’s enigmatic tough-guy cop has become part of our cultural psyche, earning his creator no less than four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards and an unrivalled reputation as the UK’s number one genre bestseller. A regular broadcaster and cultural commentator, Rankin is as renowned for his acute critical perspective as his fictional output. He was awarded an OBE in 2002 for services to literature and holds three honorary doctorates.

Featured in the Daily Telegraph’s recent ‘50 Crime Writers to Read Before You Die’ list, Colin Bateman is the author of Divorcing Jack, Belfast Confidential and BBC1’s prime-time thriller series Murphy’s Law, starring James Nesbitt.

So, for the last word on Rebus and everything after join Colin Bateman as he puts Ian Rankin under the spotlight."