John Kelly is an artist. His father is from Cork, and mother from Bristol. The family emigrated to Australia in 1965, the year of John’s birth. Kelly has lived in all three countries and for the past decade has resided in West Cork. This week, his exhibition, John Kelly: A Group Show, will open at Uillinn in Skibbereen.

3/5

Literature doesn’t get much stranger — nor more fun — than this. 

Hanif Kureishi, the English novelist and playwright of Pakistani extraction, is best known for acclaimed work like My Beautiful Laundrette, Intimacy and ‘The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1990. Frequently ambitious in terms of subject matter and exploring the boundaries of genre, new work by him is always eagerly anticipated.

MUSIC NEWS: Apple Music, the new streaming music service gets a boost today with the release of Dr Dre’s Compton: A Soundtrack exclusively on that facility and the almost traditional format, iTunes. 

AS any court functionary will confirm, the lower levels of our justice system would have far less to do if, like those socially peculiar countries Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, we banned alcohol.

Jonas Karlsson

Omniplex, Mahon, Cork

Last week, we heard a powerful, well-connected individual was apparently being subjected to “Kafkaesque” treatment by the State. The claim reeked of hyperbole, and lacked all credibility.

Selma *****

A High Court judge has suggested that a case in which a father of six was barred from entering the street where he lived as a result of legal proceedings he knew nothing of had Kafkaesque overtones.

Generally regarded as one of Japan’s most important living writers, Yoko Ogawa has, over a 25-year career, produced a stellar body of work and won all of her country’s major literary honours.

Alan Shatter has suggested he was wrongly forced to resign from Government because of the findings of the Guerin report which he lambasted as "fundamentally flawed" and akin to a "kangaroo court".

Paul Auster

Tributes have been paid to world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, a gifted pianist who spoke of how life is “beautiful” in spite of suffering terrible losses at the hands of the Nazis.

An economist, Diarmuid has always had literary leanings.

MOBILE phones are a wonderful thing. A digital umbilical cord, they allow your kids to roam freely, getting up to unsupervised god knows what, but still smart enough to send the odd reassuring text telling you are alive and well, whilst forewarning you of their next demands for food, cash, a lift, or all three.

At the end of last year this column took up the cudgels again in the GAA statistics battle, invoking Jorge Luis Borges in an effort to stimulate the debate.

A Swiss theatre director has said Russian immigration officials barged into a Moscow theatre where he was re-enacting a play based on the trial of punk band Pussy Riot in order to check his documents.

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.”

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

Jiri Sliva credits his success to a series of chance meetings, says Tina O’Sullivan

Spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch is as forthright as ever in condemning the injustice that caused her to forsake America, says Ed Power

Encounter

Zadie Smith

The man set to be South Africa’s next president emerged victorious today from a corruption case that dogged him for eight years.

LIKE Prague’s famous Astronomical Clock which, disappointingly, is undergoing renovation in the Old Town Square, Cork City’s stand-in manager Dave Hill is keeping his selection for tonight’s Uefa Cup game against Slavia Prague firmly under wraps.

The city of Prague paid tribute to its most renowned literary son today, unveiling a monument to Franz Kafka.

IS IT because this house has undergone such a metamorphosis that its vendors call it Franz Kafka House?

A sick and penniless man trapped in the Middle East has been abandoned by the British government, he claimed today.