We dipped into a couple of events in Limerick for the now-branded “Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O’Brien“. Presumably KOBstock was ruled out early in the marketing meetings. Everything’s a festival now, so can’t complain too much I suppose.
Anyway, Limerick’s always good for a visit, so we did.
The first talk we went to was non-Kate O’Brien-related:
Christine Dwyer Hickey, Edward Hopper: Turning an icon into a novel. Christine will discuss the writing of her latest novel, The Narrow Land. Set in Cape Cod in the summer of 1950, it tells the story of two young boys who befriend a couple living nearby in an isolated house overlooking the sea – the artists Edward and Jo Hopper.
http://limerickliteraryfestival.com/Programme/
This was excellent – the author was a brilliant presenter and really brought her adventure writing the book to life.
The following day, we attended one of the hardcore Kate O’Brien talks.
Disclaimer: I’ve never read anything by Kate O’Brien. I feel that if I’d devoured every book she ever wrote, I still wouldn’t have had the level of interest that many of the audience clearly exhibited – they were geeks of the highest order, and why not?
The dreaded part of the Q&A session when someone (normally a man, often English) starts with “this is more an observation than a question, but…” and proceeds to ramble on about something for 10 minutes happened, but wasn’t too painful.
After the debut novel award presentation that followed (congrats to Nicole Slattery, who was well-feted at last year’s Festival of Writing and Ideas, so not a great shock to me), we went for a roast beef lunch at the Alex Findlater nearby, which more than made up for the dryness of the preceding hour for me.