Colm Tobin To Programme Literature For Arts Festival 2007

Kiklkenny Advertister
www.kilkennyadvertiser.ie

Kilkenny Arts Festival this week announced that award-winning Irish writer Colm Toibin will programme the literature events for next year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Novelist, journalist, playwright and literary critic, Colm Toibin is from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford and studied at University College Dublin. His first novel, The South, won The Irish Times Literature Prize in 1991. Other novels include The Heather Blazing (Encore Award 1992), The Story of the Night (1997), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and, more recently, The Master, a fictionalised account of the life of novelist Henry James. The Master was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the biggest international literature prize, earlier this year. His play Beauty in a Broken Place was produced at The Abbey in 2004. His collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, has just been published by Picador. A former editor of In Dublin and Magill magazines, his non-fiction work also includes the travelogue Homage to Barcelona (1989), Walking Along the Border (1987) and The Sign of the Cross – Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of Austin, Texas. He is a member of Aosdana and lives in Dublin.

Other curators to join the team at Kilkenny Arts Festival include leading Irish and international violinist Catherine Leonard who will curate the Classical Music Programme; Theatre director Jimmy Fay will take charge of the Theatre Programme while art gallery director and international curator Hugh Mulholland will programme Visual Art.

The four new curators will be joined by returning programmers Gerry Godley (Jazz, World and Traditional Irish Music) and Emer McGowan (Children and Young People's Programme), both of whom will be curating their third Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Next year's festival runs from 10-19 August 2007.

Speaking at the announcement of plans for 2007, Kilkenny Arts Festival CEO Geraldine Tierney expressed her excitement at the prospect of combining new energy with curators who have established themselves in Kilkenny.

"We are really thrilled with the team we have put together for 2007. It is so exciting to have such a wealth of experience and depth of creativity working together on next year's festival. We already have much of the programme in place and I think the ideas and plans under way are challenging, exciting and invigorating. It's going to be a very special year."