Latest news with #ArlenHouse
Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Humour and author's voice stand out in collection
Although rarely out of fashion, the Irish short story has experienced something of a renaissance in the last decade, aided in part by an abundance of literary journals and small presses nurturing the form. One such outfit is Arlen House, the feminist publisher celebrating 50 years since its founding by Cork woman Catherine Rose, now run by Alan Hayes. This radical small publisher remains as enthusiastic as ever in championing the many writers on its varied list. A recent offering is Even Still, the debut story collection from Celia de Fréine, a seasoned and award-winning poet and playwright, born in Newtownards and raised in Dublin. Elsewhere, de Fréine writes across genres in Irish and English, and the story My Sister Safija is a translation of her original, Mo Dheirfiúr Maja . The standout qualities of de Fréine's collection are voice and humour. From a child navigating the perils of her city streets to an amateur actress finding relief from the daily grind, her characters' interior monologues always feel authentic. She resists a nostalgic view of 20th century Ireland in favour of spotlighting its difficulties and dangers for women and girls, with a healthy dose of comedy alongside everyday horrors. The opening three stories are told from the point of view of the quick-witted Veronica, following her from a working-class Dublin childhood into young womanhood and beyond. The second offering, The Story of Elizabeth, was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Short Story of the Year Award, and all three of Veronica's stories are peppered with delicate foreshadowing alongside moments of profundity — her mother is reluctant to part with old and broken items because: 'They all belong to a story she's afraid she'll forget if they're thrown out.' It's refreshing to read a collection with so many genuinely funny lines. De Fréine has an impressive ability to mix drama and humour that is reminiscent of major playwrights such as Friel. As with Friel, I got the impression that the short story is perhaps not de Fréine's most natural form. A tendency towards summarisation and sweeping, urgent plots can at times feel more suited to stage or screen. Tension is expertly built only to be conveniently dispelled, a reliance on the first person can make the similarly aged protagonists feel interchangeable. De Fréine's prose style works fittingly in other instances, such as in the delightfully meta The Short of It, where an Irish teacher is taking an evening writing class and mining her life for material, or in the dark fairytale-like La Cantatrice Muette , in which a butcher in a passionless marriage loses half a finger and finds a renewed lust for life. Yet, de Fréine shines most brightly in this mode when she gives her ideas room to breathe and roots her spiky characters in present tense action. In Vive la Révolution, one of the strongest stories in the collection, class differences among a group of students in 1969 are subtly rendered through the energy of a house party, perennial in its relevance: 'After a few minutes shifting our feet on the same carpet stain, he edges me towards the bedroom.' This story would sit easily in any of Ireland's top literary journals and showcases de Fréine's potential in a form that she is perhaps still finding her own feet in. An altered arrangement and heavier editorial intervention may have benefited Even Still, but there is no denying de Fréine's unique talent and knack for a comical flourish. As her writer in The Short of It remarks: 'Shit happens to everyone, but it's your own individual way of writing about that shit that makes it interesting.'
Irish Independent
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Award winning author set to host Donegal fiction competition
The 2025 Allingham Festival will take place in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal from November 5 to 9. Headline events will include a keynote speech by human rights activist Nelofer Pazira, a performance of The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong starring Don Wycherley, and an interview with broadcaster John Creedon. Nuala O'Connor will judge the entries in the 2025 Allingham Flash Fiction Competition. Judge Nuala O'Connor's sixth novel Seaborne about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards, and it was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award. She won the Irish Short Story of the Year Award at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and her novel Nora was selected as the One Dublin One Book choice for that year. Menagerie, her fifth poetry collection, has been published by Arlen House. Alongside her judging duties, Naula will also interview award-winning author Donal Ryan at the festival. Donal Ryan, winner of the 2025 Orwell Prize for his novel Heart, Be at Peace, will be at the Allingham Festival on Saturday afternoon 8 Nov in the Abbey Centre. The 2025 Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions are open for entries through September 28, 2025. Details and tickets for all events, including the Literary Lunch and the Donal Ryan interview, will be available through the Festival website. Winning entries will be announced and read at the Literary Lunch on Saturday, November 8.
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: This Year Her Present by Victoria Melkovska
This Year Her Present wasn't a book — my shelves sag under the weight of volumes she's given me over the last two decades since I moved from Ukraine to Ireland; wasn't a dress — she has such a sharp sense of style: the last one was a black linen gown with traditional cross-stitched sleeves; wasn't a postcard — bought at the vintage fair in Kyiv where she knows every vendor by name and they welcome her soft, smiley face; wasn't a notebook — she chooses journals one-of-a-kind, leather-bound, with printed fore-edges on pastel pages, growing glowers and vines; wasn't a sweets box — candies no Irish store can match in their taste, the songs we spun on air and echo of our side-splitting laughs; wasn't fragrant mead — Piastowsky or Kurpiowksy drinking honey I can't get in Dublin for love or money, so she packed it in her luggage for me in Lodz duty free. This year her present was a brown bottle of Lugol iodine — to swallow when the heavy air wears a radiation halo at the edge of nuclear war. Reprinted courtesy of Arlen House This week's poem is from the newly published anthology of Irish women's poetry, Washing Windows V. The anthology's series title has a significant founding story. The poet Eavan Boland, a major supporter of women's talent, was told by a gifted writer in her workshop that she didn't want her poems to be published. It was because if her neighbours knew she was a poet they'd think she never washed her windows. I hope she and her neighbours since changed their minds. The current collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of Arlen House, Ireland's first feminist press, with new, unpublished poems by more than 300 poets from Ireland and beyond. Many names will be familiar to readers, among them, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Sinéad Morrissey, Rita Ann Higgins, Kerry Hardie and, an unexpected pleasure, Edna O'Brien. The so-far less familiar, younger generations of writers are well-represented: they include Victoria Melkovska, a poet and journalist, born in Ukraine in 1977 and resident in Ireland since 2003. It's clear from the self-assured informality of tone in This Year Her Present that the writer knows her readers well and effortlessly shares their verbal idioms. Her list of presents from home is cleverly organised by means of a title that functions as a first line, leading to an unexpected negative, 'wasn't'. 'Wasn't' is the key that opens in each quatrain a treasury of earlier gifts from a female relative or friend, based elsewhere, possibly in Kyiv, but persistently 'present'. The gifts transport a shared cultural identity, while the donor remains un-named. Obliquely, Melkovska's poem functions as a 'thank you' letter, while being at the same time an entrusting proclamation of her own identity to the wider audience looking over her shoulder. The first present evoked leads to an image of overstocked 'sagging bookshelves' – the kind most of us can relate to – inexpensive, ad hoc, not the comfortably rooted bookshelves of long-established library owners. Suggesting a combined love of books and lack of privilege as common denominator, the phrase may help attune readerly sympathies. Elsewhere, the unique preciousness of home is asserted, sometimes through flavoursome gifts of food and drink that might locally be thought exotic, and can't be obtained 'for love or money'. A 'vintage' postcard brings the sender's face into sudden friendly perspective: more mysterious is the 'one-of-a-kind' notebook or journal, with its 'printed fore-edges / on pastel pages', designed to reveal glimmers of pattern or picture as you fan the leaves. Melkovska doesn't tell us directly if painful reminders are carried by the gifts. Each of them, whether a dress or notebook, is welcome and life-enhancing: a talisman. Melkovska's stanza-structure is generally cohesive, but there's an exception in stanza five: '[This year her present] wasn't a sweets box …' 'Sweets box' is refreshingly un-idiomatic, and it allows the expansion of the idea that the word 'sweets' has a Shakespearean dimension (as in Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, 'Sweets for the sweet …'). For Melkovska, too, the sweets are not mere confectionery: they contain 'the songs we spun on air / and echo of our side-splitting laughs'. This meeting of the giver and the recipient might have been face-to-face, although 'on air' could suggest virtual or radiophonic contact. Of course, 'spun on air' also evokes 'spun sugar' and other kinds of aeration, literal and metaphorical. In any event, there's no doubt of the happy reciprocity of sweets shared between speaker and present-sender. After the sensuously delicious verbal evocations of Polish 'honey mead' in the sixth stanza, the final awaited revelation is particularly stark: 'This year her present was / a bottle of Lugol iodine'. The poem might have ended there, with a potent silence and, perhaps, a footnote explaining the purpose of the iodine. Melkovska chooses to follow her structural template, to seek images of the unthinkable, and the name of the unnameable. Besides the 'heavy air', she conjures the light of the radio halo in the newly sinister form of a 'radiation halo'. In the context, the reference to 'the edge of nuclear war' reminds us there is an edge that politicians, even the worst of them, might draw back from, but that there is no end to the potentiality of such a war when narcissism habitually attracts them to that edge. It's a reminder, too, that no national borders, no kinds of edge, are observed by radiation. Victoria Melkovska's first collection For the Birds was published in 2023. You can enjoy a short reading by the poet here.
Irish Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Percentages by Nuala O'Connor
The woman on the TV news is listing tariffs, but my ear is only half open to the drone of percentages due to land on chewing gum and vapes, communion wafers and negligées, on tinfoil, snowploughs, and gym equipment. Until, among all this, plus tents and motorcycles, the newsreader says there will be tariffs on poetry. I drop my fork, loaded with pear and melon chunks, and yelp, 'A tax on poetry?' then a farm flashes onto the screen, and I see hens upon hens upon hens. Nuala O'Connor's sixth novel, Seaborne, was shortlisted for An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House this year.
