Glittering Prizes 2009

It is that time of the year again when Awards are in the air and congratulations are due to the many past and current Annaghmakerrig residents who are in the running for a range of Awards:

Congratulations to Abbie Spallen who has been nominated for her recent play Strandline for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize given annually for women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre.

Congratulations to nominees for IRISH TIMES POETRY NOW AWARD

• Peter Sirr
• Vona Groarke
• Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin

Congratulations to Board Member Peter Fallon whose publishing house Gallery Press published four of the five nominees.

Congratulations to the many Annaghmakerrig residents who have received nominations for The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards 2009 including:

• Annie Ryan
• Dylan Tighe
• Michael West
• Seán Óg
• Loose Canon
• Jason Byrne
• Tania Banotti
• Conor Linehan
• Gina Moxley
• Karl Quinn

Congratulations to Julie Feeney who has been nominated Best Irish Female in the Meteors Music Awards Julie spent a considerable amount of time here in Annaghmakerrig working solely on all of the words for the work. Pages is released on her own mittens label

Times may be hard and funding tight – but talent remains untouched and we are proud to be associated with all the nominees for 2009. Keep up the good work – your country needs you!

Eithne McGuinness Dies

This peice is taken from the Guardian Newspaper

Eithne McGuinness, a frequent visitor to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, has died of cancer aged 48. She was a playwright and actor who was startling as Sister Clementine in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters. She infused her characterisation with a magnetic mix of cruelty and innocence.

A descendant of Muriel Gifford, who campaigned for Irish independence, Eithne had a strong sense of social justice. After attending secondary schools in Dublin, she worked in the Fitzpatrick Castle hotel in nearby Killiney, moving swiftly up the ranks with her capacity for hard work and scintillating sense of humour. She spent a decade in the US, returning to Ireland in the early 1990s and devoting herself full time to theatre.

Eithne soon carved out a niche in Dublin's theatre community, writing and performing one-woman pieces, including The Queen of Sheba and Typhoid Mary, a lyrical, elegiac play about Mary Mallon, an Irish cook who unwittingly infected her New York clients with typhoid in the early 1900s. Eithne first performed Typhoid Mary at the 1997 Dublin Fringe festival. A year later, a radio version was produced by RTÉ (the Irish national broadcaster). Eithne revived the theatre production in 2004 and again in 2009 for an international tour that was cut short by her illness. Her final appearance as Mary was, fittingly, in New York.

Eithne worked with many Irish theatres and was rarely "resting". She also engaged with community groups, bringing tremendous creativity and vitality to storytelling and theatre projects in Dublin, particularly the inner-city areas around Sean McDermott Street and Ballybough. In 2000 she appeared in the Irish TV soap Glenroe. During the last two years of her life, she entertained audiences all over Ireland with her beautiful singing voice, adroit dancing and perfect comic timing in the shows Menopause: the Musical and Dirty Dusting.

Eithne's dramatic writing was the quiet twin of her life as an actor, a vocation that she pursued with passion and a ruthless attention to detail. Her plays explore difficult, morally complex themes with humour and insight. A Glorious Day, set during the 1916 Easter Rising, was given a public reading at the Abbey Theatre. Limbo, dealing with immigration, was produced in 2000 and 2001.

In 2004 Eithne embarked on an MPhil in creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin, during which she wrote Miss Delicious, a powerful play about sexual abuse, which was later workshopped at the Abbey Theatre. Plans to produce it were under consideration when Eithne became ill.

She will be missed for her wit, warmth, perceptiveness, honesty and her wonderful dinner parties. She is survived by her parents, Kevin and Iseult, her sisters, Maura and Niamh, and her brothers, Barry and Dermot.

Tóibín wins Costa Novel Award

The following is a quotation from the RTE website

Irish author Colm Tóibín has been named the winner of the Costa Novel Award for his book 'Brooklyn'.

The Costa Awards, formerly the Whitbread Prize, "recognise the most enjoyable books of the last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland".
Tóibín beat Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel ('Wolf Hall'), Penelope Lively ('Family Album') and Christopher Nicholson ('The Elephant Keeper') to the award.

The judges said of Tóibín's 'Brooklyn': "Poised, quiet and incrementally shattering - we all loved this book and can't praise it highly enough."
Tóibín's book will now go forward for the Costa Book of the Year award, which will be announced later this month.

Joining Tóibín on the shortlist are: Raphael Selbourne ('Beauty', First Novel Award winner), Graham Farmelo ('The Strangest Man', Biography Award winner), Christopher Reid ('A Scattering', Poetry Award winner) and Patrick Ness ('The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, Book Two)', Children's Book Award winner).

Colum Mc Cann

The Following is a Quotation from the National Book awards website

ABOUT THE BOOK
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire’s “Best and Brightest,” and his short film Everything in This Country Must was a 2005 Oscar nominee. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City with his wife and children.

finalistread f mccann from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Eugene donates signed copy

Author and Playwright Eugene Mc Cabe started the ball rolling for the Tyrone Guthrie centres Online Book Shop by donating a signed First Edition copy of his recent novella "For the Love of Sisters" We hope that other authors accociated with the centre will follow his lead and donate signed copies of thier works for sale. 100% of the proceeds benifit the Tyrone Guthrie Foundation whose goal is to promote the creation of arts