REVIEW : Interactive Session with novelists, Dermot Bolger & Gerard Donovan as Part of Irish Literary Festival

Gerard donovan, Pat Bourne, Dermot Bolger ( Left to Right )

• The room may have seemed too still and calm and sparsely peopled when you entered, but within about 15 minutes, the audience at the third event of the Irish Literature Festival in New Delhi realized they were on to something really good. Pat Bourne, Deputy Head of Mission, Embassy of Ireland, did a quick introduction to Irish Literature and to the two guest writers – Gerard Donavan and Dermot Bolger – an essential background story, and left Urvashi Butalia, editor and publisher, Zubaan Publishing to take over the proceedings.
• It was an interesting panel on the dais:
• An alert and cosmopolitan looking Gerard Donavan who lives and teaches in New York, started writing when he was 3 years old – he was ‘born with the inclination’, wrote his first book at 8, won his first writing competition at 13 – and hasn’t stopped since.
• Dermot Bolger, who looks like a benign Mormon elder, but actually hails from the North of Dublin and from the young age of 20 has established himself as a publisher, novelist, playwright and poet.
• Urvashi Butalia, well known in Indian literary circles, a feminist and publisher of women’s writing proceeded to draw attention to some of the key highlights of Dermot and Gerard’s work, while also involving the writers to comment on issues like English as the language of the colonizer, and religion as a form of identity in writing – a similarity both Indian and Irish writing probably share.
• The session was lively and led to talk of restrictive landscapes and large novels; women who choose between love and security; hibernal English and how British and American English is more literal “while the Irish do their thinking between the words” – perhaps the Gaelic influence; trans-fertilization of writers; and the availability of Irish work in India.
• Certainly an evening which ensured you attend the next event at the Festival.

• Source Event :
• TALK : Interaction with novelists, Dermot Bolger & Gerard Donovan as part of Irish Literary Festival at India Habitat Centre - 17th Jan 08