Over 3,000 literary enthusiasts from throughout Ireland and further afield will gather in the Clare County capital this weekend to attend the third annual Ennis Book Club Festival.The three-day programme of events, in association with Clare County Library, is expected to inject in excess of EUR1 million into the local economy. The Festival programme will feature author visits, readings, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, musical entertainment and chocolate tasting in various venues around the town. The line-up includes John Boyne, author of “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”; Salley Vickers, best selling British novelist and author of “Miss Garnet’s Angel”; John Breen, author of “Alone It Stands”; Jennifer Johnston, Booker Prize nominated writer; Allan Guthrie, Scottish crime novelist; Mark O’Halloran, award winning writer and actor; and journalist and broadcaster Kevin Myers.
The festival launch this evening will include a "giant book club gathering" featuring a mass reading and discussion of “The Book of Lost Things" by novelist John Connolly.
One of the highlights of the weekend will be the Sunday Symposium during which the theme of ‘Reading Politics’ will be explored by Sinn Féin President and published author Gerry Adams, journalist and political analyst Conor O’Clery, Public Relations consultant Terry Prone and Labour politician Michael D. Higgins. Meanwhile, students from Trinity College Dublin will stage an exclusive performance of “The Trial of Oscar Wilde” at Ennis Courthouse. The only other enactment of the trial, which led to Wilde’s public disgrace and two year imprisonment for acts of "gross indecency”, was held at Trinity College in April.
Other festival participants will include Gerard Stembridge; novelist, film director, playwright and co-author of the satirical radio show ‘Scrap Saturday’; Colm Liddy, Newmarket-on-Fergus author of "40 Fights Between Husbands And Wives"; Gerard Donovan; author of the Booker Prize nominated “Schopenhauer's Telescope”; Aifric Campbell, author of “The Semantics of Murder”; travel writer Manchán Magan; and Denis Sampson, broadcaster and author of a book on John McGahern entitled “Outstaring Nature’s Eye”.
Poetry will also feature prominently at the festival. Winner of the Rooney prize for Irish Literature, Medbh McGuckian; founder member of Aosdána and winner of the Marten Toonder prize for Literature, Micheal O'Siadhail, awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1982 and in 1998 the Marten Toonder prize for Literature.; Dublin-based Russian poet, Anatoly Kudryavitsky; winner of the 2003 Cúirt Festival Poetry Grand Slam, Kevin Higgins; new poet Tom Conaty, Galway writer and poet Órfhlaith Foyle; and poet and dramatist Rita Ann Higgins, whose many accolades include the Peadar O’Donnell Award, will all delight and challenge their audiences during the Festival.
