Latest news with #ShaneTivenan
Belfast Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
'I find something that inspires me in every single book I read'
Authors Byddi Lee, Shane Tivenan and Hannah King tell Belfast Telegraph about their most impactful reads The childhood book I cannot forget is a book of fairy tales by Hans Christen Anderson, which contained the story 'The Tinder Box'. I don't remember the contents of the story, but I remember the sensation of holding the book and the effect it had on me. It was the first time I experienced an absolute take over by story. The way reading could rip you from your surroundings and place you in an alternative universe. The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker is my favourite classic read. A hands down masterpiece by an English writer who tracked the flight and habits of the peregrine falcon for 10 years in his home county of Essex. Within a few years he could track the birds based on instinct alone. Becoming so close to them that his mind, and writing, seemed to slip in and out of his own consciousness and that of what he obsessed over. At times he brings you fully inside the perspective of the peregrine, and gives you the felling you are looking back down from the sky at your old self. And the prose — it's at a level I haven't come across since.
Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
To Avenge a Dead Glacier by Shane Tivenan: Visionary debut collection gives voice to life's important silences
To Avenge A Dead Glacier Author : Shane Tivenan ISBN-13 : 978 1 843519171 Publisher : Lilliput Press Guideline Price : € 15.95 'The woman in black silk and funeral veil unveils the plaque for Okjökull – A letter to the future.' So begins the title story of To Avenge a Dead Glacier, a sprawling, genre-defying piece that opens in Iceland at a ceremony for a vanished glacier. From there, the story shifts, travelling from desolate plains to working-class Irish kitchens, tunnels beneath protest camps and the fluorescent numbness of supermarket aisles. It is about environmental collapse, but also grief, class, memory, protest and legacy. The opening story, Dino Matcha, moves with a stream-of-consciousness poetic rhythm, threading together the lives of graffiti artist Dino Matcha and Charlie Clarence, a Scottish immigrant and father. Dino's art is both invocation and exorcism, an attempt to remake his crumbling town, which, he says, 'never got over that missed penalty against Milan in 1975″. The generational damage is raw, and Charlie's regret and Dino's fractured philosophy come to a quiet, shattering point by the riverbank, where the only act of healing is putting socks on someone else's feet. READ MORE The weight of inheritance presses against every story. In Hush Mavourneen, the Police Are Watching, one of the collection's most delicate and devastating pieces, a man named Gerald navigates the challenging waters of queer identity in a rural town that both sees too much and refuses to see at all. 'You can't undo a tattoo,' he says, half-prayer, half-warning. Tivenan never lets his characters become symbols. They bleed, long, ache, and remain. His stories move through landscapes of erosion and disrepair, yet resist despair. There is poetry in the pain, rendered in sentences both honed and raw. [ The Illegals by Shaun Walker: The Russian agent who couldn't get Irish people to shut up, and other spy stories Opens in new window ] [ Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane: A potentially transformative vision Opens in new window ] Moving from the gritty to the tender, Tivenan shifts gears later in the collection with Resurrection of a Corncrake, where the narrator's reflection on lost land creates a sense of nostalgia mixed with regret. The cement mixer, with its 'burnt oil' that 'won't make it back down to where it came from', becomes a potent symbol of irreversible damage. To Avenge a Dead Glacier is a collection that listens closely to the silences – environmental, familial, societal – and makes something luminous out of them. Tivenan is not just chronicling collapse; he is giving voice to the bones beneath the ruin and the small beauties that survive. A vital, visionary debut.
