Dublin Writers Festival 2010 - 1st to 6th June

Over ten years ago Canadian poet Anne Michaels published one of the most lauded literary debuts in recent memory – the multi-prize-winning Fugitive Pieces. Not since Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a decade earlier, had a first novel of such 'compelling power' and 'poetic depth' caught the public imagination. Among its accolades were the 1997 Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award.

The long-awaited publication of Michaels’ second novel The Winter Vault will be one of the publishing events of 2009. To celebrate, Dublin Writers Festival welcomes the Toronto-based author to the stage for a one-off Irish visit.

The Winter Vault tells the tale of a young engineer employed to help rescue the great temple at Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. But as the floodgates open and lives are deluged, the engineer and his new wife suffer a terrible loss of their own. Like Fugitive Pieces before it, The Winter Vault weaves historical moments with the quiet intimacy of everyday life, exploring, with breathtaking poise, what we might salvage from the violence of human existence.

Anne Michaels is also the author of three prize-winning collections of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (1986), Miner’s Pond (1991) and Skin Divers (1999).

Fiction and Autobiography

To a degree all creative writing is autobiographical. Most writers draw to some extent on their own experience to create character and narrative. But when does fact blur into fiction and fiction fact?

The narrative arc of Melvyn Bragg’s most recent quartet of novels (The Soldier’s Return to Remember Me) closely mirrors the author’s own well-publicised story. In this special event the broadcaster, writer and novelist explores the subtle interplay between the imagined and the real in the creation of fictions and telling of stories.

Melvyn Bragg is also one of Britain's pre-eminent broadcasters, writers and cultural commentators. His four-decade-long career has been punctuated by a series of media milestones: from his 30-year tenure of London Weekend Television's flagship arts programme The South Bank Show to a series of BBC Radio 4 staples including Start the Week (88-98), The Roots of English (99-2001) and the station’s weekly history of ideas programme In Our Time.

Introduced by writer and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary

This year marks two landmark anniversaries: the 70th birthday of poet Seamus Heaney; and the 80th of iconic publishing house Faber and Faber. To celebrate, Dublin Writers Festival presents a one-off event with the Nobel laureate as he reads a personal selection from a lifetime’s poetry.

In March this year Heaney won the prestigious David Cohen prize, awarded for ‘a lifetime's excellence in literature’. It honoured a seminal body of work, spanning the poet’s career from his1966 debut Death of a Naturalist to his latest translation, Robert Henryson's medieval Scottish masterpiece Testament of Cresseid. Between those milestones, Heaney has twice won the Whitbread – for The Spirit Level (‘96) and Beowulf (‘99); the T.S. Eliot prize – for District and Circle (‘06); and the ultimate literary accolade: the Nobel in 1995.

Heaney's poetry shares Patrick Kavanagh's belief in the capacity of the local and the parochial to reveal the universal. That universality is reflected in Heaney’s standing today as a truly international figure. Catch him at his evocative best – bringing gravity, cadence and warmth to his own verse.

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 with compelling results.

Sebastian Barry is the Dublin-born playwright, poet and Booker-shortlisted author of the best-selling A Long Long Way. His latest novel The Secret Scripture reveals the contingent lives of centegenarian patient Roseanne McNulty and her long-term psychiatrist, Dr Grene. Told through their respective journals, it reveals two lives blighted by ignorance yet marked by passion and hope.

Described by Nick Hornby as ‘the best English novelist of his generation’, Jonathan Coe made his name with the caustic satires What a Carve up and The Rotter’s Club. His new novel The Rain Before It Falls strikes out for fresh new territory as the dying Rosamond reveals a tumultuous family history, bequeathed through a series of taped revelations to a cousin's blind granddaughter.

De Niro's Game is the debut novel by Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage, originally published in 2006.

The novel's primary characters are Bassam and George, lifelong friends living in wartorn Beirut. The novel traces the different paths that the two follow as they face the difficult choice of whether to stay in Beirut and get involved in organized crime, or to leave Lebanon and build a new life in another country.

The IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. Since its inception in 1996 it has rewarded the likes of Colm Toibin, Orhan Pamuk, Michel Houellebecq, Nicola Barker and Per Petterson for outstanding works of literary merit.