Divorcing Jack, with introduction by Colin Bateman
Sunday 31 January, Queen's Film Theatre, 2:00 pm.
The regional youth work charity, Public Achievement, is hosting a fundraising event at the QFT on the theme of local pride. They will be showing Divorcing Jack with an introduction by Colin Bateman. A raffle sponsored by local companies will also take place. Tickets cost £5 and can be bought from Public Achievement.
Contact:Bronagh Weiniger, 028 9044 2813, bronagh@publicachievement.com, Other University Area
Fiction writer GARBHAN DOWNEY offers some belated advice to the First Family
If Peter and Iris Robinson have indeed been reading my novels, I must strongly appeal to them to stop immediately.
I watched Thursday night’s Spotlight programme with all the unfolding horror of a puppet-master whose charges have sprung to life and are racing towards a very messy finale.
So I am pleading with them now, NOT to buy my new book, out next month, as it could damage their lives irreversibly.
Let me explain.
Since 2004, I have published five black comedies set in the world of Irish politics, and the Robinsons, it seems, have now adopted all of them as life-coaching manuals.
Let’s start with Running Mates (2007), which centres on a crooked race for the Irish presidency. In it, the right-wing candidate is a lifelong advocate of family values to such an extent that he employs a perfectly lovely psychiatrist whose speciality is “curing” homosexuals.
My fictional doctor’s techniques include giving his “patients” copies of Readers’ Wives and instructing them to pretend they are “married” to some of the prettier ladies. I don’t know what methods Iris’s friend used...
Okay, this first hit could be a coincidence, I’ll grant you. But let’s go back a bit. In Off Broadway (2005), a Northern political leader is cuckolded by his glamorous wife. In my book, however, the hero is forced to forgive his wife as she knows where his bodies are buried - in his case literally. But luckily for Harry the Hurler, the media are too afraid of him to publish a word – and even collude in a cover-up.
Again, I accept, this could be a fluke. But by 2008, strange things are starting to happen, and my characters really seem to be morphing out of the pages. Yours Confidentially: Letters of a would-be MP tells the story of a planning scam, and at one stage we have a sitting
Then last year, in the novel War of the Blue Roses, I invented a totally improbable tryst between a teenager and a sixty-something hillbilly politician. It was so far off the scale, I nearly removed it from the book as I wasn’t sure readers would believe it.
But on Thursday night, up pops young Kirk and nearly blows my socks off. And people say life never imitates art.
There is some hope, however. During the Great Not Speaking Crisis of 2004, I produced Private Diary of a Suspended MLA, which predicted an eventual partnership between the DUP and Sinn Fein. So, I now feel fully entitled to claim the credit for Peter’s thawing towards Martin.
There is, however, always a moral balance to my books. Comedy by its very nature is concerned with righting wrongs and the judicial application of poetic justice. And I personally subscribe to Carl Hiaasen’s dictum that the nastier the villain, the more horrible his or her demise must be.
In my next book, for example, The American Envoy, the femme fatale, a real sun bunny winds up posted to
But that’s too much already. I’m giving the script away again.
The Robinsons really would need to stop reading now.
The American Envoy will be published by Guildhall Press in February 2010 and launched at the Dublin Book Festival.
Article appears on CSNI courtesy of the Irish News.
'All fathers are intimidating. They’re intimidating because they are fathers. Once a man has children, for the rest of his life, his attitude is, "To hell with the world, I can make my own people. I’ll eat whatever I want, I’ll wear whatever I want, and I’ll create whoever I want."'
Jerry Seinfeld
Happy fifth birthday for ‘Out to Lunch Arts Festival’
The Out to Lunch Arts Festival is back in 2010, bigger, better and bolder than ever.
From 6 – 31 January, the precocious younger sibling of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival impresses once again with a wildly diverse, attractive and affordable a la carte selection of music, literature, theatre, comedy and art.
Since it started in 2006, Out to Lunch has become the winter arts festival in Belfast, offering those living in, working in or just visiting the city nutritional and cultural sustenance through the long dark lunchtimes and teatimes of January.
Proving that quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive, Out to Lunch kick-starts the cultural calendar for 2010 with a dizzying array of entertainment, talent and food. And all from just a fiver a ticket.
A full programme of events is available at No Alibis Bookstore www.noalibis.com , you can also view events and book tickets online at www.cqaf.com or in person at The Belfast Welcome Centre, 47 Donegall Place, Belfast
LITERATURE EVENTS taking place at this year’s Out to Lunch Festival include:
Brian Keenan
Wednesday January 13
The Black Box
1pm
Brian Keenan became known around the world as a hostage in Beirut and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment, An Evil Cradling.
In this special ‘Out to Lunch’ event, Brian Keenan joins us to discuss his life and talk about his new memoir, Ill Tell Me Ma, in which he captures the vanished world of 1950s Belfast and his own disaffected childhood.
Chris Mullin: A View from the Foothills
Friday January 15
The Black Box
1pm
Chris Mullin has been a Labour MP for twenty years and has held several prominent posts. He was for a time the only person appointed to Government who voted against the Iraq War. He also chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee, giving him direct access to the court of Tony Blair.
Before being elected as an MP, he was a journalist working for the Granada Television current affairs programme World in Action. His book Error of Judgment was pivotal in securing the release of the Birmingham Six.
Mullin is irreverent, wry and candid. He offers humorous and incisive takes on all aspects of political life: from the build-up to Iraq, to the scandalous sums of tax-payers’ money spent on ministerial cars he didn’t want to use. His diary is a joy to read.
Grace Maxwell
Friday January 15
The Black Box Café
6pm
£2.00
Grace Maxwell: Falling & Laughing The Restoration of Edwyn Collins.
In February 2005, Edwyn Collins suffered two devastating brain haemorrhages. He then went on to contract MRSA as a result of an operation to his skull and spent six months in hospital.
He had lost all movement in his right side and was suffering from aphasia – an inability to use or understand language.
With the help of his partner Grace and their 18-year-old son Will, Edwyn fought back. Slowly, and with monumental effort, he began to teach his brain to read and speak all over again – with some areas of his mind it was if he had been a slate wiped utterly clean.
Through a long and arduous road of therapy he began to re-inhabit his body until he could walk again. Grace’s story is an intimate and inspiring account of what you do to survive when your husband is all but taken away without warning by a stroke.
Black Books
Sunday January 17
The Black Box
12noon – 5pm
Free entry
Inspired by the crafty resourcefulness of the Black Market and a cult tv-show about a dusty bookshop and a taciturn, alcoholic Irishman, trans in association with the Black Market, present a new, grass-roots book fair.
With a cacophony of stalls manned by book-sellers, zine writer’s and literary enthusiasts and an afternoon of word-based entertainment, Black Books is a revival and a celebration of the multiplicities of language and printed word.
Stalls will include new and second hand books, zines, rare books & antiquities, comic books, magazines, papers and children’s literature.
Come and enjoy a laid-back Sunday afternoon, and have a hoke through some dusty old books sitting side-by-side with cutting edge writing from both the local and international avant-garde.
Readings, spoken word performances, DIY publishing workshop and zine-related film screenings in the Black Box Café throughout the day.
NO ALIBIS BOOKSTORE
83 BOTANIC AVENUE
BELFAST BT7 1JL
david@noalibis.com
ph. 02890-319601
fax. 02890319607
