Last year was one for the books, that’s for sure. Lockdown proved a huge boost to the Irish book trade, with more than 13 million books sold, up by almost a million on 2019. Sales totalled €161.5m, the highest figure in 12 years. British research published in May revealed that people had almost doubled their reading time since March. In December former East 17 frontman Tony Mortimer made headlines when he revealed his newfound love for fiction. Never having read a novel until his daughter introduced him to the books app on his phone last spring, his joyful social media posts about the 70 books he devoured since made him famous all over again.
Film Maker Bob Quinn & the Atlantean Docu, Part of Galway Film Fleadh’s Solstice Festival
24th December 2020
Filmmaker and Aosdána member Bob Quinn
Credit: Kieran Slyne
Atlantean conjures up images of sea serpents, mythical peoples living under the sea and it is also the title of a fascinating project which Aosdána member and filmmaker Bob Quinn embarked on in the early 1980s.
The outcome was three documentaries, entitled Atlantean, which are now being screened as part of Galway Film Fleadh’s Solstice festival until January 21st.
Quinn also wrote a book entitled The Atlantean Irish published in 2005 by Lilliput Press which dismissed as myth the popular belief in “Celtic” origins.
Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon s last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a judicious selection from the magnificent six-volume Complete Letters of 2009. Had he not been a painter, Van Gogh could have made his name as a writer, as his correspondence shows. Impassioned, often heartbreaking, furious, funny and tender, these letters form a unique testament from a pivotal figure in 19th-century art. For my third choice, I am going to flout the rules by picking a book to be published in January 2021: Billy O Callaghan s Life Sentences (Cape) is a superb and moving novel of
To see it written about now, you might almost think it was a political screed, but in fact it was what its author called more of a little elegy, a love song to my native land , plainly but gorgeously written. There was Kate, the obedient one, the incurable romantic, and Baba, her alter ego, determined to smash the conventions and defy the strictures of church, priests, nuns and parenthood, she later wrote. I was, in a sense, both of those girls, though I kept the rebellious side of my nature a secret. My crime, however, did catch up with me.