In what might be a unique arrangement, the Gallery Press, in association with Faber, has published the first instalment of the Collected Plays of Brian Friel. Volume one comprises six early works including Philadelphia, Here I Come! as well as some underrated and neglected plays: The Enemy Within, Crystal and Fox and The Gentle Island. Four further volumes, including 23 other plays and adaptations, will appear over the next six months.
Peter Fallon, publisher of Friel since 1979 and editor of these editions, emphasises the possibility now of reading the body of work as it came into being and of seeing the way that less familiar plays often inform and influence recognised masterpieces.
“Keynotes are struck from the start,” he says, “the hardships of leaving and returning, family ties, the intersection of private and public circumstances. There’s a bittersweetness about the undertaking: the sweetness of assembling a monumental project, the soreness that the author who was so excited about the collaboration didn’t live to see it realised.”
In Friel's first stage play, The Enemy Within, Columba says of an older colleague, "How privileged we are to live with him." "Such privilege," says Fallon, "might be a fitting rubric for this way of honouring a master."
Paul Murray and Hannah Rothschild have been crowned joint winners of the 2016 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for The Mark and the Void and The Improbability of Love, the first time that two authors have shared Britain's leading comic-fiction prize.
Murray, who was shortlisted in 2010 for Skippy Dies, says: "I'm delighted and honoured. I first read PG Wodehouse as a boy and have kept returning to him ever since, longer than any other writer – which makes this award very special." The judges said: "Murray's setup is funny; the elegant zip of his sentences make you smile; his novel is an achingly topical, clever, delightful tale of folly and delusion. We loved it."
Sarah Crossan has won the 26th CBI Book of the Year Award for One, her novel in verse about conjoined twins, becoming only the fourth author to win both the Book of the Year Award and the Children's Choice award. John and Fatti Burke also picked up two prizes for Irelandopedia: the Eilís Dillon Award for a first children's book and the Judges' Special Award. Lauren O'Neill won the Honour Award for Illustration for her work on Gulliver, and Louise O'Neill won the Honour Award for Fiction for Asking For It.
Tender by Belinda McKeon has been shortlisted for the £10,000 Encore Award for the best second novel, a category often neglected in comparison with the attention given to promising first books. She is up against Devotion, by Ros Barber; At Hawthorn Time, by Melissa Harrison; The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota; The Curator, by Jacques Strauss; and The Ecliptic, by Benjamin Wood. The winner is announced on June 1st.
John Boyne, in his Irish Times review of this tale of friendship and longing set in Trinity in the 1990s, called it rich with wisdom, truth and beauty, and free of gimmicks or overblown prose. For him the best Irish novel since Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart, it showed that McKeon was capable of becoming Ireland's Anne Tyler.
Dublin Gastronomy Symposium will award its inaugural honorary fellowships to Prof Louis Michael Cullen and Dr Joseph A Hegarty on May 31st at a dinner at King's Inns for their contribution to food history and the study of gastronomy in Ireland. It is apt that Cullen will launch an important new book, Food and Drink in Ireland, published by the Royal Irish Academy, on June 1st, at 6.30pm, in DIT Cathal Brugha Street at the close of this year's symposium. You can find out more at arrow.dit.ie/dgs/.
Martin Doyle is assistant literary editor
