It’s a mad, mad, world

MARGARET Atwood, perhaps Canada’s pre-eminent novelist, will tomorrow attend Dún Laoghaire’s Mountains to Sea book festival. Atwood lived in West Cork for four months, with her partner, Graeme Gibson, also a Canadian writer, in 1996.

“It was very lovely,” she says. “The Gaelic name for the place was ‘smelly beach’. It was near Skibbereen. It was called ‘smelly beach’ because, once upon a time, there was a war or a fight there and they threw the bodies into the narrow bay.

“They washed out, and then they washed in again; then they washed out again, then they washed in again. After it happened a few times, it was very smelly.