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Famed writer Colum McCann / Photo by Seamus Kearney By Kara Rota and Anne Thompson, Contributors Colum McCann’s newest novel, ‘Let the Great World Spin,’ was announced November 18 as the winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction during a black-tie ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. In his personal history and in his writing, he is a man of many different places. McCann is an Irish writer, born in Dublin, partly educated in Texas and Japan, who has been a New York resident for over fifteen years. He has never confined his writing or his life to one cultural sphere. Perhaps the best we can do is to call him a citizen of the world, someone willing to find emotional connections everywhere. It is appropriate, therefore, that his award-winning novel takes on the worldwide and yet emphatically located question of 9/11. ....
By Kara Rota Her love of classic music (both Irish and American), classic cars and an unwavering belief in the good old-fashioned American Dream has seen Tara O’Grady through three CD releases and a book deal – not bad for an Irish girl from Queens. With a touch of superstition and lots of winking charm, she shared her story with Kara Rota. Tara O’Grady comes from a line of adventurous women on journeys. Her mother, from Mountcharles, Donegal, came to America on a boat in 1957. Her parents met at a dance in Woodside, Queens. “[My mom] approached dad at the bar and said, ‘What county are you from?’ and he said, ‘The Bronx.’ She goes, ‘No, I mean in Ireland, what county are you from?’ and he said, ‘The Bronx!’ She said, ‘I hate when Irish put on American accents,’ and he’s like, ‘I’m American! I was born in the Bronx!’ His dad was from Roscommon, in Ballaghaderreen, and his mom was from Waterford, in Kilmacthomas. Mom swore he was Iris ....
Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, is quite simply the story of a girl’s journey from one island to another. Miranda Donnal is a young woman caught between her father’s world as he doggedly translates Ovid in the mythic fog of Crab Island, Maine, where she has grown up motherless, well-educated and utterly lonely, and the draw of New York City, where she is sent by her father after forgoing her college admissions test to work at the Institute for Classical Studies that he founded there decades ago. The story that unfolds in Miranda’s voice is marked by the geographic and generational ambivalence of an emigration narrative, despite the fact that both Sweeney and her heroine were born in New England. “I grew up with an unspellable Gaelic name in Boston,” says Sweeney, “and I got a lot of credit for just being Irish because we were supposed to be the underdogs. I always thought my grandfather came straight from the old sod ....