November 30, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Essays, Prose and a Play on Seeing

I first came across the writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan in 2021, she wrote the opening essay ‘I Am Not An Answer, I Am The Question’ in Cut From The Same Cloth? – Muslim Women on Life in Britain edited by Sabeena Akhtar. Her essay was about the understanding she came to while a student at the University of Cambridge where she encountered a tool for attempting to ‘unlearn’: questioning.

I realised that most feminist and anti-racist politics I had engaged with up until that point were shallowly asking the wrong questions. Most of the questions being asked were not my questions at all. So much of my educational and consciousness-raising work had been the work of answering questions posed by others.

Her book Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities is an extension to the understanding she shared in that initial essay.

It is interesting to read the opening pages where she is grappling with her purpose for writing and how to begin this book, having just finished reading Annie Ernaux’s nobel lecture, where she reaches back sixty years to a diary entry and finds her opening line (her purpose for writing), in the words ‘j’écrirai pour venger ma race’ (I will write to avenge my people).

Manzoor-Khan writes about ‘the gaze of the other’ and questions whether she has anything to add to a complex and much discussed subject and finds out she does when she turns the topic on its head.

Ernaux was writing from the perspective of a higher educated French working class woman in the closing years of a writing career, while Manzoor-Khan writes from the perspective of a higher educated British Muslim woman at the beginning of hers.

Troubled by such doubts, I started to consider why being a subject rather than an object was the furthest horizon I could dream of. What lay beyond ‘seeing with my own eyes’? What if ‘seeing for ourselves’ wasn’t actually the best way to see? What could transcend the desire to be see-er instead of seen? What if I closed my eyes and did not prioritise seeing at all?

Looking into these stranger possibilities, she contemplates the how to, and finds no easy route than to go forth and try. What results is a combination of prose, poetry and a short play interspersed throughout the text; looking at the question from different angles and so too, using different genres.

Need, Want, Seeing, Overcoming

The book is structured into seven parts:

the need - how I am found
the want - how I find myself
becoming a sight - the portal of objecthood
striving to see - seeking subjecthood is a circle
escaping the cycle - even stranger possibilities
grief is a type of ghaib - love is a type of sight
a note on endings - the impossibility of concluding

The need is about clarifying intention and the want is to bear witness to an existence. This latter section opens with a poignant vignette on hoarding nineteen white IKEA boxes in the author’s room that cause her shame. On further reflection, she discovers their ‘why’, they are evidence of a life.

I am afraid to let on about this in case it becomes obvious how afraid I am to go unseen. In case it becomes obvious how powerful it is to destroy a people’s history. How catastrophic it is to leave them believing they are suspended. To eliminate their past, present and knowledge.

The Writer and The Book in Conversation

Throughout the text are acts, scenes from a short play. It is how the book opens, Act 1, a conversation between the writer and the book.

the writer: You’re not what I expected you to be.

the book: What did you expect?

the writer: You were supposed to be about seeing and being seen
About the different gazes upon us
And how to see ourselves without them

the book looks smirkingly at the writer, knowing more than her (as always).

The way these brief interludes are positioned lightens the tone of the book, giving it a different vibe, featuring characters such as the writer, the book, her head, her heart, her fear, her eyes, her soul.

Because of their brevity, the voices of those characters speak more loudly and succinctly than the more existential meanderings of the author on changing her perspective of the gaze, from ‘others’ on her to (even stranger possibilities) just the ‘one’. The many different forms that address her subject, allow the reader to consider, reflect and attempt to understand the perspective being shared.

It is a philosophical read, of short easy-reading vignettes,some that challenge more than others, of poetry and the interspersed acts and scenes of the play featuring the writer, the book, her eyes, her fear, her head, her soul. In another scene, a group of onlookers struggle with the question of being seen, of invisibility, of too much visibility, of how we are perceived by others, by ourselves, by the Divine Presence…

It is a companionable read, though not easy to review, as the author reminds us, this is a book of questions, and it is also a journey, it is not a conclusion or a set of answers, it is observations, reflections, it invites participation, it does not exist in isolation.

It puts into word the frustrations and injustice of invisibility and challenges that which is seen (the blind scrutiny) in its place.

Perhaps rather than the head, the intellect, the eyes, the judgments, we ought to perceive with the soul, if so, what might that look like?

Rather than striving to be seen, approved or understood by gazes that shrink me, all I have to do is that which brings me closer to my Maker, who sees the full context of me. Everything else is either a means to this or a diversion from it.

The book is available from its UK publisher Hajar Press, and as an ebook here.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Author

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge.

She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn.

Her writing has also featured in The Guardian and Al Jazeera, and her poetry has been viewed millions of times online. She is a co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in prison. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

November 29, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

I Will Write To Avenge My People, The Nobel Lecture by Annie Ernaux tr. Alison Strayer & Sophie Lewis

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

In October 2022 the French author Annie Ernaux became the first French woman (the seventeenth woman) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a diversity of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner’s responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content—from Lessing’s and Gordimer’s concrete political lessons to Szymborska’s larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)—each contains observations that are at once totally complex and completely true. – extract from LitHub article by Jessi Haley

The Agony and Experience of Class

The Nobel Committee recognised that ‘in her writing, Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class.

They awarded her the prize:

“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”

In this slim volume is the acceptance speech given by Annie Ernaux on 7 December, 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden, alongside a short biography (both translated by Alison L.Strayer). There is a brief banquet speech included, translated by Sophie Lewis.

It is a brilliant introduction to the motivation of the lifetime of work and writing by Annie Ernaux, opening with a reference to the title – alluding to the challenge of a search for the perfect opening line to her upcoming Nobel Prize lecture:

Finding the sentence that will give me the freedom and the firmness to speak without trembling in this place to which you have invited me this evening.

She doesn’t have to look far, she says, although the line she refers to – the title of her talk – is one she wrote in a diary sixty years ago.

j’écrirai pour venger ma race

It was written when she was 22 years old, the daughter of working class parents, studying literature in a faculty of sons and daughters of the local bourgeoise; an echo of Arthur Rimbaud’s cry in Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell):

‘I am of an inferior race for all eternity.’

A young woman, the first of her family to be university educated, her youthful idealism was projected into those words.

I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of land-less labourers, factory workers and shop keepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.

Turning Away From Convention

Her first attempt at the novel was rejected by multiple publishers, but it was not this that subdued her desire and pride, to eventually seek a new form of expression.

It was life situations in which the weight of difference between a woman’s existence and that of a man was keenly felt in a society where roles were defined by gender, where contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime.

These situations and circumstances instilled in her a pressing need to move away from the “illusory ‘writing about nothing’ of my twenties, to shine light on how her people lived, and to understand the reasons that had caused such distance from her origins.

Like an immigrant now speaking a language not their own, a class-defector, she too had to find her own language, however, it was not to found in the pages of the esteemed writers she had been studying and was teaching:

I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me. What came to me spontaneously was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and shame at feeling shame.

Recognising that when a reader was culturally privileged they would maintain the same imposing and condescending outlook on a character in a book, as they would in real life, she sought to elude that kind of gaze and thus her trademark style evolved:

I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion. The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing, no matter what the subject.

It’s an enrapturing lecture and an excellent introduction and insight into Ernaux’s particular and individual style, and wonderful that her volume of work has been recognised and celebrated at this esteemed level. You can read the lecture using the link below.

I have read one book by Ernaux, A Man’s Place and I am planning to read Shame, A Simple Passion and her masterpiece The Years.

Shame Simple Passion The Years Annie Ernaux Nobel Prize Winner 2022

Have you read any books by Annie Ernaux? Are you planning to read any?

Annie Ernaux, French Author

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.

They had lost a little girl of seven before I was born. My first memories are inseparable from the war, the bombings that devastated Normandy in 1944.

She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.

After abrief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.

Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.

One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).

The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.

Fitzcarrraldo Editions have now translated and published eleven of her works into English, including this booklet.

Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring. – Nobel Prize Committee

November 17, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden

Seeking Refuge On the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

Sally Hayden is a correspondent for the Irish Times, who has reported stories across Africa and the Middle East for a wide range of media, including the Guardian, CNN, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 News, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Earlier this year, I read River Spirit by Sudanese/Scottish author Leila Aboulela and as I was interested to understand a little more of the history of Khartoum, Sudan, I started reading some informative news articles by the Irish correspondent Sally Hayden.

I then discovered she had recently written a book, a very powerful and important book.

A Non-Fiction Tour de Force

Her book My Fourth Time, We Drowned was the winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Irish Book Awards Book of the Year 2022, it was shortlisted for the Bailee Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022.

In 2018, Sally was contacted by refugees incarcerated in Libyan migrant detention centres, who were using hidden phones to appeal for help.

“Sister Sally,” a man WhatsApped her in 2018 from a Libyan detention centre for refugees, “we need your help.”

“I had stumbled, inadvertently, on a human rights disaster of epic proportions,” Hayden remembers.

From that day, she became a kind of lifeline to many, staying in contact, travelling across the region verifying facts and keeping a vigilant eye on those she had come to know travelling along the Central Mediterranean migration route, between Libya or Tunisia and Italy or Malta. The UN has called it the deadliest migration route in the world.

A 21st Century Human Rights Scandal

Since 2014, more than 28,200 men, women and children have died or gone missing on the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe – more than 22,400 of them along this route.

In her book, she documents the messages and traces what happens to some of these people, and referring to a map, focuses on every detention centre and shares the conditions and some of the events that occurred in each of those places. It is a compilation of evidence and an act of ‘seeing’ those individuals whose lives have been demeaned and exposes the reality of unwholesome alliances forged between European leaders with warlords, militias and rebels who profit from the movement of human beings through political funding and extortion.

Returning people to Libya traps them in a cycle that also involves human smugglers. The smugglers work in league with both the coastguard and the detention centre management – this has been documented by an independent UN fact-finding mission, as well as by me. Videos of captives being tortured are even circulated by their families on social media, in a desperate bid to raise ransom money through crowdfunding. Eritrean journalist Meron Estefanos says around one billion euros in ransoms could have been paid to smugglers in Libya by now.

The main reason for her focus on the Central Mediterranean route was because of the role and impact of the European Union (EU). A law graduate with a Master’s in International Politics, she would investigate and report on the circumstances that lead to this becoming a major humanitarian crisis, as a result of EU policy, that funded and facilitated thousands of people being captured and forced back to a militia-run state where they were often locked up indefinitely in detention centres.

Each chapter focuses on a different location, sharing the messages from people being held, the dire conditions, the punishments, the ransom demands, the deaths. The ineffectiveness of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the suggestion of Rwanda as a new route for safety, the trial of known smugglers at Addis Ababa, where Hayden is the only foreign correspondent present. The humanitarian lawyers who made a submission to the International Criminal Court calling for the EU to be charged with crimes against humanity.

She also travels to parts of Africa where some have returned home to, to find out how they are faring, and then the few who made it to a safe country, who ares starting new lives – how it is now for them.

It is difficult to encapsulate the extent of this testament to the experience and situation of a large group of people made to live and die in terrible, inhumane conditions here, but it is an opportunity to avail ourselves of the knowledge of the repercussions of these funding policies and to understand what is behind these so-called solutions to a humanitarian crisis.

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil,” wrote one detained Eritrean refugee, “but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

An extraordinary, detailed and condemnatory read. Highly Recommended.

Journalist of the Year, Irish Journalism Awards 2023

Just this week (Nov 15, 2023) Sally Hayden was named journalist of the year at the 2023 Irish Journalism Awards. Hayden also received the award for best foreign coverage for Irish Times articles on famine risks in Somalia, Sudan’s pro-democracy movement and unrest in Sierra Leone over its cost of living crisis.

Sally Hayden, Author

Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. She is currently the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times and in 2023 won journalist of the year at the Irish Journalism Awards.

Her writing has been translated into nine languages and she has appeared on national and international media.

David Edgerton, the Chair of Judges for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022, commented:

Hayden’s reporting is an extraordinary exploration of a modern reality using modern means: truly a book of our times. While many people seeking refuge from the terrible logics of repression, war and poverty cannot easily cross frontiers, phone and Facebook messages can. They allow contact with home but are also the means by which ransoms are gruesomely demanded by traffickers. But they are also the way in which Hayden explores the lives of people stuck under the control of traffickers, militias, the UN, and lets them speak to us as full human beings: hungry, ill, and often doomed in their quest for safety. She gets the terrible truth out to a world that has been far too indifferent.

November 10, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Poor, A Memoir by Katriona O’Sullivan

Grit, Courage, and the Life-Changing Value of Self-Belief

Poor is the story of a young woman as she looks back at the circumstances of her birth, childhood and younger years, through the lens of having been raised by parents who were addicts. The middle sibling of five children, she would become pregnant at 15, abandoned and homeless. And then things got even worse – until she began to find the support and mentors she needed to begin the long climb out of a destiny she desperately wished to avoid.

It is a riveting read, constructed from the hopeful perspective of having by chance – in the people she met along the way – found support and been shown how to save herself and the path to higher education.

More importantly this book is essential reading for anyone considering working with children, for parents and those in higher education who might have a tendency to favour “the good, the ideal” student, to think about how we might uplift and give hope to those who might not fit that category.

Turning Points In A Life

Irish Book Awards Biography of the Year 2023

Katriona’s story pinpoints the moments in childhood that mark a life, both the good (the teacher who taught her and facilitated her being able to manage her own cleanliness) and the bad (a man her parents left her with), from which there is no turning back, but perhaps with the right resources, there can eventually be a kind of healing.

Being able to look back and identify those moments that shifted her self-worth, while often devastating to relive, enabled her to understand their impact and address them through appropriate methods, and where they were positive shifts, to cultivate gratitude.

It also highlights the many adults that let these children down.

I know my parents let us down, significantly. The blame is with them. Of course it is. But the world around us let us down too, and in a way, that is worse. Because my parents were drug addicts and that is how it all got so bad and messed up. But the people of the world around us – the police, the teachers, the social workers – they were untrustworthy. They pushed us into a corner and frightened us. How could we have grown up to do anything else but bite them back?
My parents let me down, but so did the world. And the world was where I had to live.

She is one of the few who has managed to climb out, to break a cycle; her story is shared in the hope others who identify, might find the motivation to pull themselves towards something that might bring them out of what is almost inevitable if you’ve grown up in such an environment.

I’d take a heroin addict parent over an alcoholic one any day of the week. That may seem surprising but there is a meanness in booze and horrible unpredictability that you just don’t get with heroin addiction.

It is also for those who have never known such misery, to refrain from judgement, to be open to understanding what happens to people in these situations, how they got there, the consequences and the ineffectiveness of today’s government policies in properly identifying the cause, creating and applying appropriate, sustainable solutions.

This isn’t a tale of woe is me or blame, and neither is it a story of a one-off. It is a demonstration of the difficulty of these lives, and a desire to want to change the world in a more caring and empathetic way than it is now, to search for and find and fund solutions, so that more might learn how to follow a different path, when similar struggles are present.

My education has taught me that choice is a myth: our path is set by history and it is very rare for someone to change that path. I am one of the lucky few who escaped the destiny set for me by my parents’ addiction.

Inclusivity and Diversity, We Must Do Better

She challenges educational institutions to do more to be inclusive of struggling students, to strive for the value of greater diversity. “Diversity brings power”.

Although the ‘same’ opportunities are open to people of all backgrounds, we live in a system where those coming from stable, secure childhoods do well and there is no allowance for the struggle of those who don’t. We need equity in education, not equality. If someone can’t see straight because the world is falling in around them, we need to raise them up to clearer skies…and the truth is, we are losing some brilliant minds in the trenches of poverty.

In an interview with the Guardian she expresses her fury at the rhetoric around poverty – that if someone is poor, it is their own moral failing, and if only they worked harder, they could drag themselves out of it. It is society that loses, she points out.

“We’re missing talent, vibrancy and creativity. Because I’ve been empowered, I have been able to change my life, my children’s lives. I’m not costly any more to the state. I’m not doing all of the things that happen when you live in poverty. The people who are making decisions are clearly very educated and yet they don’t seem to have the long-term lens on what investing in reducing poverty can do.”

A brilliant and engaging memoir and an important voice in support of educating children out of poverty.

Highly Recommended.

Poor has been shortlisted for two categories in the 2023 An-Post Irish Book Awards for Biography of the Year and for the Listeners’ Choice Award (winners announced 22 November).

Katriona O’Sullivan, Author

Dr Katriona O’Sullivan was born in Coventry to Irish parents. In 1998, at 20, she moved from Birmingham to Dublin and subsequently enrolled in the Trinity College access programme. She went on to gain a PhD in psychology from Trinity and joined its staff.

She now works as a senior lecturer in Digital Skills in Maynooth University’s Department of Psychology. She has worked with policy-makers to develop strategies around education and inclusion, and has been an invited speaker at the UN, the World Education Forum, the European Gender Action Workshop on Women and Digitalization.

Most recently, the programme she leads to improve working class girls’ access to education in STEM subjects won the Most Impactful Initiative Award at the Women in Tech Europe Awards in Amsterdam.

She is married with three children and lives in Dublin. Poor is her first book.

“I needed encouragement to build my life and the tools to give it structure and strength. I needed tools to understand the world and how to think.

I needed an education.” Katriona O’Sullivan

November 9, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Time For Outrage, Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel tr. Marion Duvert

Looking Beyond the Ordinary & Expected

On a recent visit to Paris, I accompanied friends on a day-trip to the town of Épernay in the North East of Paris, 30 kilometres south west of Reims. Like Reims, it is known for its champagne houses, vineyards and the close to 50 kilometres of underground tunnels built to store their wine, a veritable underground city.

The town sits on layers of chalk, which gives those underground tunnels their unique aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of their product and why the fierce protection over the use of the word ‘champagne‘. Champagne is only ‘champagne‘ if grown and cellared and produced in the Champagne region of France. If not, its crémant, prosecco, cava, sparkling …

The archbishops of Reims controlled the town of Épernay from the 5th-10th century, it then passed to the counts of Champagne and in 1642 to the Duke of Bouillon.

It was badly damaged during the Hundred Years’ War, and was burned by Francis I in 1544. Having been destroyed or burned more than 20 times, the town has few ancient buildings, the mansions you can see there today are mostly from the 1800’s.

The Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars are on the World Heritage list for the Protection of World Culture and Heritage for all humanity.

The town also houses some 9th century manuscripts, a wine museum and archaeological artifacts.

Stéphane Hessel encourages youth to engage!

As we wandered along the famous Avenue Champagne with its palatial 19th century mansions, some of which can be visited for wine tastings, I looked for number 31 (a favourite number) to take a photo. At about the halfway point in the long, fairly sterile avenue, it was not a champagne house, but a 2,000 + student lycée (high school), named Lycée Stéphane Hessel.

I was intrigued and delighted to see the name of this institution, certain that it must have been named recently, I knew that Stéphane Hessel had died only 10 years ago.

The high school was named in 2013/2014 when the lycée Godart-Roger et lycée Léon-Bourgeois merged to become the lycée Stéphane Hessel, renamed in tribute to this inspirational author of a best-selling essay, written and directed specifically towards youth.

Discovering this lycée was one of the highlights of my visit, I found it brilliantly provocative that in the middle of this world famous avenue of procuring bubbles, sat a human rights activist, member of the Resistance, a voice for peace and equality, the author of a famous essay, written in his 93rd year, 3 years before his death in 2013.

It a short half hour read that has since been translated into numerous languages and sold 4.5 million copies worldwide.

I knew about it because at the Salon de Livre in Paris in 2014, there were massive queues of young people lining up to get their booklet signed by him or to listen to him talk. Journalists were intrigued and wanted to know why these young students were so interested in the words of a very old man. The response was “because he lived it” they said, unlike most who teach us about this era, this man actually lived through everything he has written about. He is authentic, we respect that.

The Essay

Stéphane Hessel wrote his essay in his 93rd year and considered himself fortunate to be able to reflect at that age on events that laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to politics and human rights.

Born in Germany, he became French in 1939 and in 1941 fled to London and became part of Charles de Gaulle’s group of Resistance members.

He returned to France to organise communications, was captured and sent to Buchenwald, tortured and later sentenced to execution by hanging. He and two others managed to escape execution through an act of identity exchange.

He wrote of the declaration adopted by the National Council of Resistance in March 1944, a set of values and principles created to guide the nation’s modern democracy once it was freed from occupation. He reiterated the importance of many freedoms that came with the end of the war, demanding that they continue to be protected for the good of all.

It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain one of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion or a society that disputes the welfare state or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy.

Find Your Reason

The basic motive of the Resistance was indignation. He addressed his young audience, reminding them of this and implores them to find their reason for indignation, to join the great course of history, to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if encountering someone who is robbed of these rights, to have empathy and them help them reclaim them.

He wrote about the rise of fascism and his understanding of the origins of it, and how young people today will find their own reasons for expressing their outrage. His indignation was born less of emotion than a desire to engage. He was influenced by the words of Jean-Paul Sartre who said “You must engage – your humanity depends on it.”

The Worst Attitude is Indifference

There are unbearable things all around us, look for them he said:

This is what I tell young people: If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. “There’s nothing I can do; I get by” – adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage.

He highlights the challenges, of grievous injustices inflicted on people deprived of the essential requirements for a decent life, the widening gap between rich and poor and the violation of basic freedoms and fundamental rights, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” and his own participation in the creation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I will never forget the crucial role played by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose great kindness and natural authority worked wonders to help reconcile the disparate personalities that comprised the commission. She was a vibrant feminist, and it is largely due to her that, for the first time, and on a global scale, the equality of men and women was inscribed without ambiguity in an official text.

His message is one of active engagement, nonviolence and hope, against injustice.

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

It is an inspiring short work, that I encourage everyone to read, its message could not be more appropriate at this time, given all that the world is currently facing.

Stéphane Hessel, Author

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel (20 Oct 1917–26 Feb 2013) was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance member. Born in Germany, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and protection for the post-World War II social vision.

His book IndignezVous! (Time for Outrage! )sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.

October 31, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Soundings, Journeys in the Company of Whales by Doreen Cunningham

Soundings is a dual narrative memoir, that recounts two journeys a woman makes, pursuing her dream to see the grey whales that migrate up the coast from Mexico where her journey begins, to the northernmost Arctic town of Utqiagvik.

The Iñupiat have thrived there, in a place periodically engulfed in ice and darkness, for thousands of years, bound closely together by their ancient culture and their relationships with the animals they hunt, most notably the magnificent and mysterious bowhead whale. I hadn’t just seen the whales there, I’d joined a family hunting crew, travelling with them in a landscape of astonishing beauty and danger.

Doreen Cunningham Whales memoir nonfiction

The book is structured so that each chapter alternates the twin journeys, the first one when she is a young BBC journalist on a sabbatical – the trip isn’t a job assignment, she is winging it, not knowing ahead of time where she might stay, or that she might join an indigenous whale hunt – to be in a position to observe the whales.

She is going there to listen, observe and with luck, participate.

The idea was that you could immerse yourself in a place and absorb more than if you were questioning people as a reporter and narrowing the world down into stories. I was supposed to take thinking time away from the relentless news cycle, open my mind and return bursting with creativity and new ideas.

The second trip is more of an escape from her current reality, that of a young single mother awarded sole custody, who can not afford to live in her home (due to high mortgage payments), reluctantly returned to her parents home in Jersey – who then decides she wants to make a return trip and provide her two-year-old son a formative experience of travel and whale watching.

I’d felt so alive then, so connected to other people and to the natural world. If only I could feel that way again and give that feeling to Max.

I recalled reading Scottish poet and nature essay writer Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing, where she visits and brings alive an archaeological site Nunallaq, in the Yup’ik village in Quinhagak, Southern Alaska.

Kathleen Jamie Essays Surfacing Nature Writing

Doreen Cunnningham’s interest in whales and the environment inclines more towards the science, research and a personal desire for a sense of belonging and a large dose of wishful thinking, than the more poetic and philosophical Jamie, who went towards the tundra in search of surfaces that might reconnect us to the past. However, the two books together make informative and astonishing reading.

I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live.
Beneath the surface, secretly, I longed to get back to northernmost Alaska, to the community who’d kept me safe in the harsh beauty of the Arctic and to Billy, the whale hunter who’d loved me.

Once you realise that the narrative goes back and forth, it becomes easier to stick with it, the chapters in the more recent past focus as much on the logistics of trying to travel with a child, car seat and stroller, finding kindred spirits who might assist getting her on a boat to see the whales, while doing her best to avoid those fellow travellers who look askance at a young mother, attempting the extraordinary.

As they travel, she also shares something of the challenges in the past of reporting on climate change, the reluctance to report on the environment and the habit many broadcasters had of always finding a sceptic to present an alternative view to the facts.

What was going on was that media all over the world had regularly been allowing sceptics o misrepresent science without adequately challenging them, and presenting them as though they carried equal scientific weight to mainstream climate researchers…This ‘insistence on bringing in dissident voices into what are in effect settled debates’ created what the report called ‘false balance’.

In her earlier visit, she takes time to listen to their stories, of the first ships that came in, bringing equipment, alcohol and disease. She hears of the social problems of another indigenous people, of children sent away, of PTSD, of a sense of rage and powerlessness, of a need to educate themselves in order to better represent and protect their culture and ways.

Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) from Natural by Biodiversity Heritage Library is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

She also hears of the effect of the warming of the ocean first hand, its impact on animals, on the ice, on patterns of behaviours, of the risk to their livelihood and comes to understand the importance differences between a people who live in harmony with their environment and depend on it and those who came intent on exploiting it.

We also learn a little of her childhood experiences, of her wild pony Bramble, of an Irish granny and the songs she still sings that the whales seem to respond to. She injects enough of the personal story to keep the pace going, as the flow risks at times being overwhelmed by the facts and background research. However, as I go back and reread the passages I highlighted, I find it interesting to encounter some of this information a second time around, now that I’ve removed the expectation of a flowing narrative.

There is a something in this book for everyone, it defies genre and shows the gentle, yet vulnerable courage of a young mother persevering against the odds, seizing the reins of her life, following her intuition and going on a grand adventure with a small boy, who is perhaps more likely the greater teacher to her than the elusive whales, on motherhood.

Doreen Cunningham, Author

Doreen Cunningham is an Irish-British writer born in Wales. After studying engineering she worked briefly in climate related research at NERC and in storm modelling at Newcastle University, before turning to journalism. She worked for the BBC World Service for twenty years as an international news presenter, editor, producer and reporter.

She won the RSL Giles St Aubyn Award 2020 and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award 2021 for Soundings, her first book.

October 18, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Cacophony of Bone by Kerri Ni Dochartaigh

When I saw that Kerri ní Dochartaigh had a new book out, I was intrigued. I read her debut Thin Places (reviewed here) in 2022, it was a tough read at times, especially as I went into it thinking it might be nature writing akin to others of the genre I’ve read. It was not. It was much darker.

At that time, nature, more than an observation, provided solace to an ever present dread and those thin places were a kind of magical opening and hint of acceptance that kept her here – just. The book trawled through a sombre northern Irish childhood into young adulthood, as the author attempted to rise out of a grasping fog towards finding their place and way in the world. To feel safe, while railing against the after-effects of trauma. From nightmares to numbness, nature was her nurturer.

Cacophony of Bone Thin Places creative nonfiction

While that book was challenging because of all it makes the reader feel, Cacophony of Bone was proof of a move forward, of a shift out of the rawness of her earlier existence and while still in the process of healing, clear signs of hope and progress and development. A relationship that comes across as more anchored and a commitment to sobriety. New circumstances that hold promise.

It began two days
after the winter solstice,
as all stories begin:
with light.

Essentially, it is a beautifully sculpted 12 month hybrid journal/memoir with splashes of poetry. It begins just as she is making a move to a one room very basic railway cottage in the middle of Ireland with her partner/lover, a couple of months before the country/world is going into lockdown. It becomes a year of noticing, of planting, growing, of collecting objects, abandoned nests, bone remnants…

To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce.

At the beginning of each chapter before the brief, dated, diary entries, which are short poetic fragments and thoughts, there is a longer text that contemplates – a navigation of layers of loneliness, grief and gratitude, observations of birds and moths, planning, planting and harvesting a garden, recognising the importance of rituals, appreciating the constant and reliable companionship of another human being, developing connections with amazing women she has never met (yet) and embracing the comfort to be found in lines of language, the soothing power of words, the immense power and wonder of books.

Ritual finds form through the assumption that it is a means of really knowing something. Religious ceremony and personal rites of passage fill my thoughts. The gently, insistent act of repeating. How it creates equilibrium between the small and the vast, the seen and the unseen, the self and other, the part and the whole. We build myths (which are really just houses). Dwelling places built of the bones left behind by stories. We fill the gaps in the walls with ritual. We insulate it with objects.

Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew.

I don’t think I have ever read a book that made me stop so often to look up references to predominantly works of creative nonfiction, poetry and memoir. It was a year of isolation, but Kerri ní Dochartaigh was able to read (and reread) from a bountiful collection of stunning literature. I admit to placing two orders with my new favourite Kenny.ie independent bookshop during the week I read the book.

creative nonfiction bird migration songbirds

It was no surprise to see mentioned the works of Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sara Baume, it felt like these women hail from a similar soul group, literary sirens whose words lure readers not to their deaths, but to their visions and streams of conscious thought.

I find myself searching for the words of others as a means to fill the holes that the actions of (other) others have left in me.

We encounter throughout the pages Alice Oswald, Tove Jannsson, Moya Cannon, Annemarie Ni Churreain, Annie Ernaux, Terry Tempest Williams, Karine Polwart, Sarah Gillespie, Ellena Savage, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rebecca May Johnson, Rebecca Solnit, Kathryn Joseph, Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, Anne Lamott, Richelle Kota, Alice Vincent, Lauret Savoy, Rebecca Tamas, Tania Tagaq, Emily Dickinson, Louise Erdrich, Colette Fellous, Sinéad Gleeson, Selva Almada, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Campbell, Elske Rahill, Octavia Bright, Alice Miller, Maggie O’Farrell, Genevieve Dutton and more…

After being alone for a long time, one starts to listen
differently,
to perceive the organic and the unexpected all around,
to brush against all the incomprehensible beauty of the material. Tove Jansson, ‘The Island’

It’s a book that follows the seasons, that reminded me of reading Alice Tucker’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic and Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking, it takes some skill to keep a reader engaged in a form of nature diary, but the blend of personal story, observations of nature, literary references and the curiosity of seeing where the author will end up after the revelations of Thin Places, all made it a compelling read for me, that became increasingly absorbing the further I read.

It’s a heart laid bare, bruised but beating madly with the joy of being alive.

I’m left intrigued and curious about what will come next, although that might be quite obvious, since the end is in effect the dawn of a new beginning. A work in progress.

Highly recommended.

Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy

A thought provoking memoir that won the Best First Book in the General Nonfiction category of the New Zealand Book Awards 2023, ‘Grand’ is a reference to the good old Irish vernacular, a bit like the way others use the word ‘fine’, when it covers a multitude of sins, lies, omissions – a word that sums up an aspect of societal tendency, used to avoid expressing what is actually occurring.

Grand, tells the story of Noelle McCarthy’s growing up in Hollymount, County Cork and the highs and lows of being around a mother, who had already lost two children before she was born and was herself never comforted by her own mother. Seeking to self-regulate through the effect of alcohol, Grand demonstrates numerous effects of having been raised under those circumstances and how a multi-faceted generational trauma passes down.

McCarthy finishes university and after a chance encounter with a New Zealander in a cafe where she worked, decides to travel to New Zealand and finds herself propelled into a media career after a stint in student radio, then becoming a sought after broadcaster and interviewer.

Though it does wonders for her freelance prospects and professional reputation, the lifestyle also pushes her deeper into addictive tendencies, denial and dysfunctional relationships, until the day arrives when she knows she has to change.

She doesn’t hold back from sharing the increasingly ugly detail of late nights, memory lapses and destructive episodes. She notices her inability to schedule morning appointments, in anticipation of planned hangovers and realises it is not normal.

I do not know, at this point, how the people I work with are able to ignore the general air of chaos that surrounds me.

There is a moment in a conversation with an experienced friend, while contemplating whether or not to attend meetings, she is confronted with a moment of choice.

I ask her: ‘What will happen if I go back to the meetings, but I’m not really an addict or an alcoholic?

She shrugs her narrow shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I guess you go for a while, and then stop because you don’t need to be there? Not that big a deal really.’

A pause. ‘ And what if I am an alcoholic, and I don’t go? What will happen then?’

She moves her spoon to one side, picks up a pair of chopsticks delicately. ‘It will get worse. Addiction is progressive.’

The feeling better part after having given up alcohol takes some time to manifest and is beautifully described in one scene by simple observations through the window of a bus. As the vehicle picks up speed, she is filled with “a fierce, clean joy that comes out of nowhere”. She is nearly 31 years old and her life is beginning anew.

The bushes that line the road are full of passionfruit vines and spiky, colourful bird-of-paradise flowers. I watch the kids in their school uniforms chugging Cokes, women at the bus stop, just normal workers going about their business, and I don’t hate them the way I used to. I am just a person among people, no better and no worse. I am nearly six months sober.

The memoir tracks her path to sobriety and to a coming to terms with who her mother is and was, and to her own ‘becoming a mother’.

Photo by Doug Brown on Pexels.com

It’s interesting that subtitle, because to me she doesn’t “become” her mother’s daughter, if anything that is who and what she is fated to be, without healing or recognition of the generational trauma that lead to her addiction. What she does “become” is’ a mother to her own daughter’, the one role where there is an opportunity to heal from the past and choose to do things differently, to learn how to self regulate her own distorted central nervous system, in order to nurture her daughter in a way that will mitigate what they have all inherited.

It is a compelling read, a deeply honest and vulnerable account of a women in self-imposed exile, trying to live differently, dealing with her own inner demons and having a kind of love/hate relationship with her mother.

The thing that really stood out to me, something that isn’t exactly written, but that is understood, was that Noelle McCarthy was the first child, her mother was able to keep. Though she struggles as a mother, Caroline kept that daughter and loved her fiercely, so this daughter, though she has to deal with the effects of her mother’s alcoholism, she has not inherited the complex-PTSD that babies who were not ‘kept‘ are cruelly gifted with. Ironically, it appears that the mother suffered this neglect, it being suspected that her own mother, most likely suffering from post natal depression, never or rarely held her own daughter.

I want to tell her then, about the study I read about baby monkeys. The ones that don’t get touched and cuddled as much, don’t grow as well, physically or mentally.

Though the relationships are a challenge to navigate, there is a sense of knowing, a sense of belonging to both that family, those siblings and the place she grew up, that leaves the reader appreciating the importance these things contribute to the wholeness of a life.

A compelling memoir and an important contribution to literature that captures the chaos, pain and steps towards healing from alcoholism and addiction.

Noelle McCarthy, Author

Noelle McCarthy is an award-winning writer and radio broadcaster. Her story ‘Buck Rabbit’ won the Short Memoir section of the Fish Publishing International Writing competition in 2020 and this memoir Grand won the Best First Book General Nonfiction Award at the NZ Book Awards 2023.

Since 2017, she and John Daniell have been making critically acclaimed podcasts as Bird of Paradise Productions. She has written columns, reviews, first-person essays and features for a wide range of media in New Zealand including Metro, The NZ Herald and Newsroom. In Ireland, she’s provided commentary for radio and written for The Irish Times, The Independent and The Irish Examiner.

She lives in the New Zealand countryside with her husband and their daughter, and she misses Irish chocolate.

Grand Becoming my mother's daughter

May 17, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

New Zealand Book Awards 2023 winners #theockhams

Back in February I posted on the long longlist of 44 books in four categories for the New Zealand Book Awards 2023, also known as “the ockhams”. The shortlist whittled that down to 16 titles and now we have a set of winners in each of those four categories and a handful of ‘Best First Book’ prizes.

Fiction Prize

No surprise that the winning novel that has captivated not just the nation (winning The People’s Choice), but also the twitterverse, narrated by Tama the magpie, @TamaMagpie, Catherine Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival won the $64,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

I’m very much looking forward to reading this, and hoping that since Europa Editions UK published her excellent novel Remote Sympathy in 2021, it won’t be long before we see this novel available in Europe and the rest of the English reading world.

Catherine Chidgey Tama the magpie

Chidgey’s masterful writing explores the diversifying of rural life, the predicament of childlessness, the ageing champ, and domestic violence. She provides a perspicacious take on the invidious nature of social media and a refreshingly complex demonstration of feminist principle.

“The unforgettable Tama – taken in and raised by Marnie on the Te Waipounamu high country farm she shares with champion axeman husband Rob – constantly entertains with his take on the foibles and dramas of his human companions. Catherine Chidgey’s writing is masterful, and the underlying sense of dread as the story unfolds is shot through with humour and humanity.

“The Axeman’s Carnival is unique: poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.”

Poetry Prize

I was particularly intrigued by acclaimed Māori poet and scholar, Alice Te Punga Somerville’s poetry collection, Always Italicise, How To Write While Colonised and was pleased to see it win this category.

‘Always italicise foreign words’, a friend of the poet was cautioned. Alice Te Punga Somerville does exactly that. With humour and rage, regret and compassion, she ponders ‘how to write while colonised’ – penning poetry in English as a Māori writer; tracing connections between Aotearoa, New Zealand and the greater Pacific region, Indigenous and colonial worlds; reflecting on being the only Māori person in a workplace; and how – and why – to do the mahi anyway.

Alice Te Punga Somerville Always Italicise

“Readers are challenged but crucially invited in to accept that challenge and reach a new understanding of what it is to be a Māori woman scholar, mother and wife in 2022 encountering and navigating uncomfortable and hostile spaces.

“Always Italicise stood out amongst a very strong field for its finely crafted, poetically fluent and witty explorations of racism, colonisation, class, language and relationships. It’s a fine collection, establishing and marking a new place to stand.”

General Non-Fiction & Illustrated Non-Fiction

Broadcaster, music critic and author Nick Bollinger won the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction for Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Drawing on archival research and rich personal narratives, Nick Bollinger has written a compelling account of an epoch-making period, linking international trends to the local context in a purposeful-yet-playful way.

“A joy to read and to hold, Jumping Sundays is a fantastic example of scholarship, creativity and craft.”

Historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher won the General Non-Fiction Award for his work, The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, shedding new light on New Zealand’s founding document’s implications, contributing fresh thinking to what remains a very live conversation for those that call Aotearoa New Zealand home. The treaty was made between the British Crown and about 540 Māori rangatira (chiefs) on February 6, 1840.

Best First Books

Home Theatre by Anthony Lapwood, a collection of interlinked short stories won the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction; Khadro Mohamed’s We’re All Made of Lightning takes the reader to distant lands, Egypt and Somalia, in heightened sensory language as she grieves for her homeland, winner of the Jessie MacKay Prize for Poetry; the Judith Binney Illustrated non-fiction, first book award went to Christall Lowe’s Kai ,which offers whānau stories and recipes that provide wider insight into te ao Māori, creating a homage to food that is grounded in tradition yet modern, the new Edmonds!

Finally, the E.H. McCormick Prize for General Non-fiction and the book I am currently reading, went to Noelle McCarthy for Grand, Becoming My Mother’s Daughter. This book was running neck-a-neck with The Axeman’s Carnival for The People’s Choice, up until the last few days, when Chidgey’s book surged ahead.

An exquisite debut, it masterfully weaves together the threads of Noelle McCarthy’s life, and her relationship with her mother, in a memoir that connects with truths that unite us all. Poignant and poetic language renders scenes with honesty and colour. Intimate, but highly accessible, the fragility and turbulence of the mother-daughter relationship is at times brutally detailed. Despite this, Grand is an uplifting memoir, delicate and self-aware, and a credit to McCarthy’s generosity and literary deftness.

NZ Book Awards

A Special Mention

Non fiction NZ art assessment 50 years as an artist One that didn’t win, but that was Number 4 in The People’s Choice and one I have heard a lot about and sighted on a recent visit to London, is Robin White: Something Is Happening Here.

Described as more than an exhibition turned art book. It features stunning reproductions, historical essays and the insights of two dozen contributors that do justice to the institution that is Robin White. As iconic screenprints flow seamlessly into large format barkcloth, White’s border-crossing practice is temporally divided with the savvy use of typographic spreads. Space, too, is given to the voices of her Kiribati, Fijian and Tongan co-collaborators.

More recently in her life, collaboration with others has become important, a way of working in the space between cultures, enriching and liberating from the confines of self.

Strikingly elegant yet comprehensive, excellence is what’s happening here.

Check out Robin White’s Artist Profile here.

February 24, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Reading Ireland Month 2023, A Wish List

Looking ahead, March is Reading Ireland month over at Cathy746Books, so I’m putting together what is currently on my shelf and what is lurking in the depths of my kindle, which I seem to have been more reluctant to read from lately, so a month of focusing on Irish literature should help.

Irish Literature Classic Contemporary Nonfiction
Cathy has set out a program below for the five weeks that focuses on classics, contemporary works (where most of my titles sit), short stories and non fiction.

Eager Anticipation

I had been looking forward to reading Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples, having read her excellent nonfiction title Handiwork, and two other novels, Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking – however I couldn’t wait and read it earlier this month. Highly recommended literary fiction, with a strong tendency toward poetic prose.

Intro Week: 1 – 5 March

I’m going to try and read the Edna O’Brien trilogy The Country Girls in the first week, which I have in one volume, but I will post as the three separate books. Originally published in 1960, 1962 and 1964, they are a portrait of youth, marriage, friendship, love and loss and I’m very excited to read this author for the first time and to begin here. She is hailed as one of the great chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century.

I managed to acquire a hardback of her 1994 novel, House of Splendid Isolation, which would be great to read if time allows.

Irish Classics Week: 6 -12 March

I have the novella A World of Love (1954) by Elisabeth Bowen, which should be possible to read in week 2.

I’m putting Brian Moore into this category, I have 3 of his novels on my shelf, a continuation, having read five of his novels for the 100th centenary in 2021. A previously neglected Irish author, he lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S., thus his literary output was created from the perspective of an outsider, looking back at his own culture, and occasionally at other cultures where he spent time, such as The Statement (1995), a political thriller set in France and The Magician’s Wife (1997), historical fiction set in France and Algeria, both of which take an aspect of French history that he found fascinating, turning them into compelling stories.

I have The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), a Belfast love triangle, Black Robe (1985), a Jesuit missionary in North America in the 17th century, and The Mangan Inheritance (1979), a recently widowed man in Canada journeys to track down an Irish ancestor.

Contemporary Irish Week: 13 – 19 March

In this 3rd week, I shall attempt one or two of these novels from the kindle.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy – this novel has garnered much praise since publication, set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen – I loved her novel Big Girl, Small Town and this latest has just been shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Award 2022/23 UK/Ireland. This is a definite, she makes me laugh out loud!

The Quiet Whispers Never Stop Olivia Fitzsimons – a dual narrative set in 1982 & 1994 Ireland, exploring the mother-daughter relationship; described as “A story of love, obsession and escape, an uncompromising, lyrical tour-de-force that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in Irish fiction”.

Listening Still Anne Griffin – her debut When All is Said was a runaway international success, a book I enjoyed about a man who toasts 5 friends of importance to him. Her second book is about a young woman who can hear the last words of the dead, though it hasn’t made the same impact on readers; she has a new book due out on 27 Apr 2023 The Island of Longing about the disappearance of a daughter and a mother’s difficulty in accepting her loss, not knowing whether she is alive or dead. This latest is getting many 5 star reviews (from those reading an advance copy), one to watch.

A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom John Boyne – an unknown man leads the reader through 2000 years of human and family history, slipping through time and space with slightly different identities, continuing on the same path, from Palestine in AD 1 to the year 2080 in a space colony. An ambitious and epic concept, a story that has had mixed reviews.

#ReadingIreland2023

Short Story Week: 20 – 26 March

I have this one collection that I shall try to get to read:

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine – stories set in Northern Ireland, where we meet characters looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by a moment in their past that marked them. In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.

Non- Fiction Week: 27 – 31 March

Cacophony of Bone Kerri ni dochartaigh I don’t have any Irish nonfiction left unread on my shelf, but I have noted that creative nonfiction author Kerri ní Dochartaigh, whose debut Thin Places I read in 2021 and enjoyed immensely, has a follow up book due out in April 2023, Cacophony of Bones.

It maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter, to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – and it is about all that does not change, that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all.

I would also recommend in this category, the excellent collection of essays The Passenger Ireland – one of my Top Reads in 2022

Literary Inspiration

Dublin One City One Read Irish Literature If you are looking for inspiration, check out Cathy’s blog, where she shares a list of 100 Irish Novels from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) to Here Are The Young Men by Rob Doyle (2014) and 100 Novels by Irish Women Writers from the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph by Frances Sheridan (1761) to Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (2017).

You can check out the One Dublin, One Book challenge – each year an invitation to read an Irish book in April. Last year, I joined in and read the excellent Nora, A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O’Connor.

In April 2023, they will be reading The Coroner’s Daughter by Andrew Hughes.

Alternatively, check out my posts:

My Year of Irish Literature – 2021 Highlights

My Top 5 Irish Fiction & Nonfiction Books

Have you read and enjoyed any of the titles here? Are you planning on reading any Irish literature in March? If so, what are you looking forward to reading? Do you have a favourite Irish author or book? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy Reading Ireland if you join in!

Essays, Prose and a Play on Seeing

Need, Want, Seeing, Overcoming

The Writer and The Book in Conversation

Further Reading

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Author

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

The Agony and Experience of Class

Turning Away From Convention

Further Reading

Annie Ernaux, French Author

Seeking Refuge On the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

A Non-Fiction Tour de Force

A 21st Century Human Rights Scandal

Journalist of the Year, Irish Journalism Awards 2023

Further Reading

Sally Hayden, Author

Grit, Courage, and the Life-Changing Value of Self-Belief

Turning Points In A Life

Inclusivity and Diversity, We Must Do Better

Further Reading/Listening

Katriona O’Sullivan, Author

Looking Beyond the Ordinary & Expected

Stéphane Hessel encourages youth to engage!

The Essay

Find Your Reason

The Worst Attitude is Indifference

Stéphane Hessel, Author

Doreen Cunningham, Author

Further Reading

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Author

Noelle McCarthy, Author

Fiction Prize

Poetry Prize

General Non-Fiction & Illustrated Non-Fiction

Best First Books

A Special Mention

Eager Anticipation

Intro Week: 1 – 5 March

Irish Classics Week: 6 -12 March

Contemporary Irish Week: 13 – 19 March

Short Story Week: 20 – 26 March

Non- Fiction Week: 27 – 31 March

Literary Inspiration