Censorship in Ireland, which was largely overturned 50 years ago, meant the public couldn’t easily get their eyes on work by our best writers, making it a badge of honour, says Donal Ó Drisceoil.

Jon McGregor has made the Man Booker list twice and also won a €100k prize from the Impac, but he’s never been totally comfortable with such accolades, writes Sue Leonard.

Sally Phipps’ biography of her mother, the novelist Molly Keane is a work of art, says Thomas McCarthy who recalls Keane’s second coming as a writer in the 1980s. He savours every word of a wonderful memoir

Michel Déon, novelist and member of the Académie francaise lived in Co Galway for the last 50 years of his life, and died last December, aged 97. 

There’s no easy answers to life’s crises when our beliefs begin to fade.

As the centenary of the 1916 Rising draws to a close, it is important to acknowledge that the apprehension that preceded the year’s flag-waving and cheers has proved unfounded.

AS the celebrations marking the centenary of one of the seminal events in the foundation of this evolving Republic begin to wind down, we must consider how we might mark the Civil War that followed without renewing the deep divisions that made that great tragedy inevitable. 

It’s time to be surprised by Leitrim’s diverse delights, from the trails of the Shannon-Erne Blueway to a fabulous forest park, writes Des O’Driscoll.

After university Christine wrote poetry, but she never published any. She had various jobs; she worked in the Arts in Bristol; she managed an art gallery, worked on an arts magazine, and wrote a grammar for foreign learners for IBM.

A new arts anthology edited by Kevin Barry and his wife Olivia Smith is a treat to warm the heart of book-lovers everywhere, writes Marjorie Brennan

Paul D'alton returned to his home in Rsocommon after 36 years abroad and it's brought him unexpected contentment. 

Collected Stories

The search to find the Top 100 books threw up some surprises when our readers responded, but the magic of ‘Harry Potter’ won out in the battle with ‘The Lord of the Rings’, writes Mark Evans.

THERE is a great lusting for a moral economy.

It is simply unbelievable that Seamus Heaney is dead. It is astonishing and it must be untrue; untrue in the deepest, most immortal sense of that word.

Live Music: Philip Chevron Testimonial, The Olympia, Dublin

JP O’Malley talks to the 55-year-old Booker Prize winner about his new novel The Guts and what it’s like to become more like his father as he gets older

Ireland of the last century may not have been the best place for someone who cherished their privacy or their time alone to do as they pleased when they pleased.

FIRST it was the green men, and now it will be no men at all.

IN ‘Of One Mind’, one of the short stories in Mike McCormack’s new collection, Forensic Songs, the protagonist describes a ‘weightlessness’ that he has come to experience in his everyday life, a sense of being “at a remove, standing at arm’s length from myself.”

The Outlaw Album

The first feature from Cork filmmaker Pat Collins continues his documentary style of evoking a strong sense of place, says Alan O’Riordan

ROSEMARY McLOUGHLIN

Long Time, No See

Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist

As a raunchy trilogy climbs the US bestseller lists, Declan Burke asks Irish writers if they’ll be spicing up their output

BORN in America, Grene spent his childhood on a farm in County Wicklow.

WE had our topic nicely selected for this corner well ahead of time: The GAA County by County, a typically handsome production by Con Collins and his colleagues at the Collins Press.

Is it even possible some day the All-Ireland final might become a three-game series?

Saints and Sinners

YOU should have seen Carrick-on-Shannon at the weekend.

A children’s writer turned one of the newest literary prizes on its head today and beat some of the world’s best sellers to win the Irish Book of the Decade title.

THE outcome of a public vote for the best Irish book of the last decade may not be revealed until next week, but sales through one website alone would make John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas a hands down winner.

LISTS that aim to honour greatness are usually no more than a snapshot of the moment we live in.

ALL art is certainly political now with Irish luminaries coming out to highlight the value of the arts to Ireland’s economic and social recovery.

THE Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission launched its annual report for 2008 yesterday, the first full year covered by the body.

IT IS reassuring if not inspiring to know that, as banks are being bought up like the cheaper paintings at a minor charity auction, that 95% of Irish teenagers believe that they lead “a happy, meaningful life”.

IT seems your columnist Diarmaid Ferriter (May 15) seeks to use the unfortunate experiences of writers Nuala O’Faoláin and John McGahern in effect to psychoanalyse the entire nation, and it appears the verdict is not particularly favourable to the rest of us.

I WAS one of many people who saw a radiant Nuala O’Faolain speaking at the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, in August last year. She gave a presentation to a symposium entitled What Were We Like? during which she was joined by novelist Anne Enright.

Playwright and novelist Thomas Kilroy today received a prestigious award to celebrate a lifetime of literary achievement.