Svět knihy 2004

Authors in the guest of honour programme

Neal Ascherson was born in Edinburgh in 1932. As a reporter for the UK’s Observer, he covered Asia, Africa, and Central Europe, focusing on Poland and the 1968 Prague Spring. Later The Observer began running his celebrated weekly column. Ascherson’s books include The King Incorported (2001), Games with Shadows (1989), The Polish August (1982), Black Sea (1995), and Stone Voices (2003).
Neal Ascherson is one of Britain’s finest writers in an undefinable genre that fuses history, memoir, and politics with meditations on places. His books on Poland were deeply influential to writers of the time, as were his collected essays on the strange Britain to which he returned in the mid-1980s. Black Sea won international acclaim and several literary prizes, including the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the PEN Silver Pen Award in 1996.
Stone Voices is Ascherson’s return to his native Scotland. Although an exploration of Scottish identity, it is much more than a journalistic rumination on that nation’s future. Ascherson instead weaves together a story of deep time—the time of geology and archaeology, of myth and legend—with the story of modern Scotland and its rebirth. Few writers can match Ascherson’s ability to evoke the unfolding of history in its natural world.

Pat Boran is an Irish writer, poet, critic, and the programme director of the Dublin Writers’ Festival. Born in Portlaoise in 1963, Boran has published four collections of poetry.
His first collection, The Unwound Clock, won the 1989 Patrick Kavanagh Award; he later wrote Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996), and As the Hand, the Glove (2001). Boran’s first short fiction book for children, All the Way from China, appeared in 1998 and was shortlisted for the Bisto Book of the Year Award.
Boran’s non-fiction work includes The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (1999), which offers hands-on writing guidance, and A Short History of Dublin (2000). He regularly reviews new publications for a number of literary journals
and newspapers. Boran conducts creative writing workshops throughout Ireland in schools, colleges, and prisons, teaching writers of all ages and levels.

Ron Butlin was born in 1949 in Edinburgh, Scotland and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. Before taking up writing full-time he was, at various times, a lyricist with a pop band, a barnacle scraper on Thames barges, a footman attending embassies and country houses, and a male model. A poet, prosewriter, and author of radio plays, his work has won several Scottish Arts Council Book Awards and has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Butlin is the author of two novels, The Sound of My Voice (1987, reissued 2002) and Night Visits (1997). He was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Book Award for his first collection of stories, The Tilting Room (1983), and for Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars (1985), a collection of poetry. Two collections of Butlin's short stories are forthcoming: Vivaldi and the Number 3 (in 2004) and No More Angels.
Butlin has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Edinburgh, Stirling, St. Andrews, and New Brunswick. As a librettist, he has been commissioned to work with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony, and the Edinburgh String Quartet, among many others. A freelance journalist for the Sunday Herald, Butlin lives in Edinburgh with his Swiss wife—the writer Regi Claire—and their dog.

Moya Cannon was born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, in 1956. She studied history and politics at University College Dublin and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1995 she served as editor of The Poetry Ireland Review. Her first collection of poetry, Oar (1990), won the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. Her second collection, The Parchment Boat, was published by Gallery Press in 1997.
Says author Deirdre Cartmill, ‘Moya almost revels in the fact that man is at the mercy of nature, that life is so “unspeakably fragile” and “we are so unexpectedly mortal”.... The lyrical beauty of her poetry brings you close enough to taste this savagery.’
In 2001 Cannon received the Laurence O'Shaughnessy Award, presented by the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. During 2003 she was writer-in-residence at Trent University, Ontario.
Cannon now lives in Galway and teaches at a special school for traveller children. Her work has been widely anthologised, and the composers Jane O'Leary, Philip Martin, and Ellen Crannitch have set several of her poems to music. She is a member of Aosdána, the select affiliation of creative artists in Ireland.

Michael Collins was born in Limerick, Ireland in 1964. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and now lives in Seattle. He is the author of the short story collections The Feminists Go Swimming (1996) and The Meat Eaters (1999), as well as the novels The Life and Times of a Teaboy (1995) and Emerald Underground (1998). His fiction has received international critical acclaim and has been translated into numerous languages. His first book, The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1993. The Keepers of Truth (2001) won the Book of the Year Award for Best Irish Novel and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and for the IMPAC Dublin Prize. The Resurrectionists (2002) is an aborbing mystery praised by The Observer for its ‘rhythmic prose of biblical density with long, cadenced sentences.’ His latest, Lost Souls (2003), a literary mystery set in a wintry Midwest America, has been nominated for the Best Irish Book of the Year.
Besides his literary acheivements, Collins competes in extreme sports events around the world, under the most brutal conditions. He has won the Last Marathon in Antarctica, the Himalayan Stage Race (a five-day, 160-kilometre ski race), and the Everest Marathon (a full marathon at 12,000 feet above sea level along the India-Nepal border).

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island, County Mayo, in 1943. He is the founding and current editor of The Dedalus Press, an ‘outward-looking’ press that publishes new Irish poetry and poetry in translation from around the world. In 1978 he founded the national organisation Poetry Ireland, which is dedicated to developing, supporting, and promoting poetry throughout Ireland. Three years later, he launched the organisation’s quarterly publication, The Poetry Ireland Review.
Deane travels widely in Ireland and abroad reading his poems, many of which have been translated into other languages such as Danish, French, Portuguese, Flemish, and Serbo-Croatian. His poetry collections include Stalking After Time (1977), Winter in Meath (1984), Walking on Water (1994), and most recently, Manhandling the Deity (2003).
He has published two short story collections and three novels: One Man's Place (1994), Flightlines (1996), and Undertow (2002). As if all this weren’t enough, he has also translated books from Romanian, Swedish, and French into English.
Deane won the O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 1998 and the Grand International Prize for Poetry in 2000; in 2003 he was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award. A member of the Irish artists’ association Aosdána, Deane lives in Dublin.

Peter Fallon is a poet, editor, and publisher. He was born in Germany in 1951 and grew up near Kells, County Meath, where he now lives. He founded The Gallery Press, considered an eminent publishing house today, at the age of eighteen. The Gallery Press has published more than 300 books of poems and plays by Ireland's foremost writers, including several collections of Fallon’s own poetry: The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987), Eye to Eye (1992), and The Deerfield Series: Strength of Heart (1997).
Fallon’s 1993 book of selected poems, News of the World, was expanded in the 1998 edition News of the World: Selected and New Poems. In 1990 he edited, with Derek Mahon, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, and he contributed to the 1992 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.
In 1993 Fallon received the O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish-American Cultural Institute. From 1996 to 1997 he was Poet in Residence at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. In spring 2000, He was named the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, which also awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. Fallon has given more than two hundred readings throughout the USA, Europe, Canada, Japan, and Ireland.

Kirsty Gunn was born in 1960 in New Zealand. She was educated at Queen Margaret College; Victoria University, Wellington; and Oxford, where she completed an M.Phil. After moving to London she worked as a freelance journalist for magazines such as Vogue, Brides, Setting Up Home, and More.
Her fiction includes the acclaimed Rain (1994), the story of an adolescent girl and the breakup of her family, for which she won a London Arts Board Literature Award; this award enabled Gunn to write full-time. Her second novel, The Keepsake (1997), is the fragmented narrative of a young woman recalling painful memories. Her newest novel, Featherstone (2002), is a story concerned with love in all its variety. Gunn's short stories have been included in many anthologies, including The Junky's Christmas and Other Yuletide Stories (1994) and The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (1997).
She is also the author of This Place You Return to Is Home (1999), a collection of short stories, and in 2001 she was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary. Kirsty Gunn lives in Edinburgh with her Scottish husband David Graham.

The Dublin-born writer Hugo Hamilton grew up speaking Irish and German, wearing lederhosen and Aran sweaters. His best-selling memoir The Speckled People (2003) tells the story of his remarkable childhood in the 1950s: how his revolutionary, Irish-nationalist father ruled the home with tyranny and forbade his children to speak English, while his German-speaking mother rescued them with cakes and stories of her own struggle in Nazi Germany. On the streets of Dublin the children found themselves in a foreign country, taunted as Nazis and subjected to mock Nuremberg trials. The Speckled People has received international attention and praise; The New York Times chose it as a notable book of 2003 and described it as ‘..turning a piece of scrupulous remembering into a work of art’. It has already been translated into many languages, and is being made into a film.
Hamilton is the author of four other novels and a collection of short stories. Three of his novels are set in Germany, where the characters explore the ongoing effects of the war and the Berlin wall. The best-known of these is The Last Shot (1991), which fictionalises the story of his mother’s experience in the war while giving the perspective of his own generation during the fall of Communism in Berlin. His subsequent novels set in Ireland, such as Sad Bastard (1998), explore the enormous contemporary changes that have swept his own city.
Hugo Hamilton recently spent a year in Berlin at the invitation of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He is a member of the artists’ association Aosdána and has taught creative writing courses at many leading universities around Europe, including Trinity College in Dublin and York University in England. He now lives in Dublin.

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Canada, where he lived for two years before moving to Ynys Mon, an island off the coast of north Wales. He was educated at the Welsh-language Ysgol David Hughes, Menai Bridge, and went on to study literature at the universities of York and Edinburgh, and at King’s College, Cambridge. He has taught courses on American literature and culture in Cambridge, Taiwan, and Bangor in Wales.
The Tower, Hughes’ first book, is set on Ynys Mon and explores the relationships between people and place. Taking a motley collection of characters—including magic mushroom heads, unscrupulous property developers, and Welsh exiles in London—he dramatises the emotional, historical, and psychological bonds between these people and the landscape that they physically and imaginatively inhabit. The Tower reflects his preoccupation with geography, identity, and the changing face of modern Wales.
In 2001 Hughes won the Rhys Davies Award for his short story ‘A Sort of Homecoming’. He is currently at work on a second novel, The Strange Journeying of Johnny Ifor Jones, to be published in 2005.

Emyr Humphreys , born in 1919 in Prestatyn, north Wales, is one of the foremost Welsh novelists writing in English. He is the author of over twenty novels, of short story volumes, verse, and non-fiction work, and was described by the poet R. S. Thomas as ‘the supreme interpreter of Welsh life in English’.During World War II, as a conscientious objector, and while studying history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, he was sent to work on the land. He subsequently traveled as a war relief aide to the Middle East and then to Italy, where he worked for Save the Children. In the mid-fifties, he joined BBC Wales as a drama producer before taking a lectureship in Drama at the University of Wales, Bangor.
He enjoyed remarkable success as a young novelist, winning the Somerset Maugham Award for Hear and Forgive (1952) and the Hawthornden Prize for A Toy Epic (1958), his most famous novel, written in both Welsh and English. In 1972, he embarked on a career as a full-time writer.
His work is concerned with goodness—with social and political conscience. It has been described as reflecting the passionate concerns of the past century with freedom, autonomy, and a post-imperial assertion of human rights; as exploring the impact of globalization on the way we communicate. His latest volume, Old People Are a Problem (2002), is a collection of short stories which explore the experience of growing old at the beginning of the 21st century.

Brian Keenan was born in Belfast in 1950. In 1985 he took up a post teaching literature at the American University of Beirut. A year later, he was taken hostage by Islamic Jihad militiamen who believed he was British. The Jihad held Keenan for four years, first in isolation and darkness and later in a shared cell with British journalist John McCarthy. In his memoir An Evil Cradling (1992), Keenan recounts the guards’ violent cruelty and occasional acts of kindness. This book and McCarthy’s twin memoir were made into a film, Blind Flight, which premiered in London in October 2003. After their release, Keenan and McCarthy fulfilled their prison fantasy of traveling together in Chile. They co-authored a book about this journey called Between Extremes (1999).
During his captivity Keenan was sustained by the presence of Turlough O’Carolan, the 17th-century blind Irish harper. After his release, Keenan researched the life of O’Carolan for two years. His novel Turlough (2000) both recreates an extraordinary historical story and honors a commitment Keenan made in his Beirut cell to the being who saved his sanity.

Declan Kiberd is considered to be one of the world’s preeminent scholars of modern Irish literature. Born in Dublin in 1951, he studied in primary school with the novelist John McGahern. In 1969 Kiberd won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he secured a double first (high honors) in both Irish and English. He then attended Oxford University, where he studied writing with the late author Richard Ellmann.
Kiberd is the author of a number of literary and cultural studies, including the hotly debated Inventing Ireland (1996), which attempts to place modern Irish literature within a socio-political and historical context. Inventing Ireland won the 1997 Irish Times Literature Award for Non-Fiction and the Oscar Wilde Award for Literary Achievement.
The idea for his 2002 Irish Classics originated almost 30 years ago: When Kiberd was a student, he yearned for a book that would treat both Irish and English literature as part of a continuum. Since no such book existed, he resolved to write it himself. Scotland on Sunday calls Irish Classics ‘a magisterial, yet passionate, evocative, and wonderfully accessible journey through the literary masterpieces in both Irish and English from the 16th-century to the present.’
Kiberd currently holds the chair in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College, Dublin. He has frequently worked as a visiting professor for other universities, including Yale, and has lectured on Irish literature in over 25 countries.

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn is a musician and the author of the Irish-language poetry collections Babylon Gaeilgeoir (1997) and Na Scéalaithe (1999). Thrice the recipient of Arts Council NI bursaries for poetry, he has gained a reputation for giving bilingual readings that are a bold and challenging mixture of music, poetry, and drama.
Mac Lochlainn’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, periodicals, and anthologies, including DubhThuaisceart and Fearann Pinn, Poems 1900-1999. His literary prizes include the Butler Literary Award, the Open House Festival Literature Award, and the Belfast City Council Arts Award. For his first bilingual book, Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues (2002), he collaborated with fellow poets Ciaran Carson, Gabriel Rosenstock, and others to create the English translations. The Poetry Ireland Review says that Stream of Tongues ‘stands as an evolutionary marker not only in Irish-language literature, but in Irish literarure as a whole’.
Mac Lochlainn currently works with the Irish-language unit of the BBC in Belfast, where he has produced and presented specials on subjects such as Gaelic haiku, the history of the Irish language in Belfast, and the history of reggae music and dub poetry. He also performs as a musician with the Irish-language reggae band Bréag, and has produced four best-selling original CDs of song and poetry for children.

Kevin MacNeil was born and raised on the Island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His dream of becoming a writer came true in 1998, when his first collection of poetry, Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides, was published by Canongate.
By this time, MacNeil had already published many pieces of writing in literary magazines and journals, had won a Scottish literature prize while at Edinburgh University, and had received a major writer's bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in 1996. Following the publication of the critically acclaimed Love and Zen..., MacNeil received the Iain Crichton Smith Fellowship in 1999 and worked as writer-in-residence for the Highlands for three eventful and productive years.
During his time in the Highlands, MacNeil edited and co-edited several books, including two collections of short stories by Iain Crichton Smith. He also wrote his next book, Be Wise Be Otherwise (2001), a series of short suggestions and thoughts that flow like a long poem. In 2000 he won the prestigious Tivoli Giovani International Award for the best collection of poetry (Love and Zen...) published in Europe by a writer under 35. He then served for a year as the British Council writer-in-residence of Uppsala University in Sweden. He currently lives on the Isle of Lewis, where his latest book, the haiku collection Less Is More or Less More, was published in 2003. MacNeil is currently concentrating on prose as much as poetry, and is at work on the novel Singing for the Blue Men.

Born in 1952, Robert Minhinnick , essayist and environmental campaigner, is one of the leading poets of his generation. The author of seven collections of poetry, he lives in Porthcawl, on the south coast of Wales. His most recent volume, After the Hurricane: New Poems (2002) characteristically moves between contrasting landscapes, from Canada, America, and Brazil to Iraq and back to Wales. The Poetry Review comments: ‘These steely, complex, moving meditations are not short of amazing. Here is a book that can explain a good deal of the weather of our souls’. Past winner of numerous prizes, including an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholomondeley Award, in 2003 Minhinnick won the Forward Prize for the best single poem.
Minhinnick has also made an important contribution to environmental campaigning in Wales and beyond. A co-founder of Friends of the Earth Cymru, he has edited several volumes on environmental issues, such as Watching the Fire-Eater, which won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993; The Green Agenda: Essays on the Environment of Wales (1994); and Badlands (1996).
As editor of Poetry Wales, he has been very influential in changing the shape of the contemporary poetry scene in Wales, and in forging an international context for Welsh poetry. He has also been central to opening a dialogue between Welsh-language and English-language Welsh poetry. A recent important contribution is The Adulterer’s Tongue (2003), in which Minhinnick’s translations bring six contemporary Welsh-language poets to the attention of readers of English.

Jan Morris was born in 1926. A journalist, travel writer, and historian, she is celebrated all over the world for her descriptions of places and people. Alistair Cooke of the time-honoured BBC Radio programme Letters from America, called her ‘the Flaubert of the jet age’ and ‘perhaps the best descriptive writer of our time’. She began her long and colourful career as James Morris, a staff writer with The Times of London, and accompanied the 1953 Everest expedition to claim one of the century’s greatest scoops. In 1972 she completed a change of sexual role, described in her 1974 memoir Conundrum, and since then she has lived and written as Jan Catharine Morris.
Morris is best known for her Pax Britannica trilogy, about the rise and fall of the British Empire, and her studies of Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, Spain, and Wales, where she now lives. Her books about Wales include The Matter of Wales (1984) and A Machynlleth Triad (1994).
A Writer’s World 1950–2000, published in 2003, is a magisterial work that crowns a lifetime of incisive and enduring writing, chronicling world events from the Cold War to the collapse of Communism and the advent of globalisation. The book is a selection of articles and essays which appeared in the British press over five decades.
Jan Morris’s complete bibliography includes some 40 books, including fiction such as the satirical novel, Our First Leader, which imagines an ‘independent’ Wales established after a Nazi invasion of Britain. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2003), her most recent volume—and last, she claims—was described as one of literature’s most impressive and subtle meditations on old age.

Eilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin in 1954 and earned her doctorate in folklore and medieval literature at the University College Dublin. Prose writer, playwright, and winner of numerous awards, she has published the short story collections Blood and Water (1988), Eating Women Is Not Recommended (1992), The Inland Ice (1997), and most recently, Midwife to the Fairies: New and Selected Stories (2003). The Irish Times compared her writing to Alice Munro and Richard Ford, saying, ‘these are indeed stories that take their time and surprise the reader with their unexpected tangents and detours. The emphasis throughout is on the intricacies of female desire and the division between outer appearances and the lived confusion of sexual relationships.... Moral and emotional dilemmas abound.’
Although most of her original work is in English, Ní Dhuibhne has written two plays in Irish—Dún na mBan Tí Thine (1994) and Milseóg an tSamhraidh (1997)—and the novel Dúnmharú sa Daingean (2000), which was awarded the Oireachtas Prize for Novel in Irish. Her other novels include The Bray House (1990) and The Dancers Dancing (1999). Ní Dhuibhne also writes children’s books, scholarly articles, and reviews. She is the editor of Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (1995). She lives in Dublin, where she works as assistant keeper at the National Library of Ireland.

Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and educated at Blackrock College and Trinity College, Dublin. Since 1995 he has taught at Charles University in Prague, where he is now a senior lecturer. He has published three collections of poetry: The O'o'a'a' Bird (1994), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize; Privacy (1999); and most recently Fuselage (2003). He also authored Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community, a critical study of Wallace Stevens. Quinn has written extensively on modern American poetry, and his articles on twentieth-century poetry have appeared in Irish, British, and American journals.
Quinn is a co-editor of the Irish poetry magazine Metre. He translates the work of the Czech poet Petr Borkovec, and his writing draws heavily on the experience of living in Prague. He is married and has one son.

Born in Dublin in 1965, Keith Ridgeway published his first book, the novella Horses, in 1997. He followed this quickly by the novel The Long Falling in 1998, which a reviewer for Scotland on Sunday called ‘the most notable down payment on posterity, and the finest debut novel, I’ve read in years.’ Ridgeway’s short story collection Standard Time (2001) won the Rooney Prize. The Irish Times said of Standard Time, ‘These flawlessly structured yarns are told in such lovingly crafted prose.’
In 2003 Ridgeway published The Parts, a mystery revolving around drug culture in Dublin. The Parts finished at number 36 in the Top 50 Irish Novels (ever) public poll run by The Irish Times and the James Joyce Centre. The Times says, ‘Bleak as its vision is in so many respects, this is a novel that simply bursts with energy and incident, with a crowded cast of vivid characters and some enormously enjoyable comic scenes.’
In 2002 Ridgeway won two Suspended Sentence residencies—an opportunity for an Irish writer to enjoy a one-month residency at a writers’ center abroad—in Sydney and Beijing. He now lives in London.

Poet, translator, and haikuist, Gabriel Rosenstock was born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, in 1949 to an Irish mother and German father. Rosenstock studied at University College Cork, where he associated with the group of poets that started the forum Innti in the 1970’s. He is the author/translator of over 100 books, mostly in Irish (Gaelic). Rogha Rosenstock, a selection from 10 different volumes of his poetry, appeared in 1994, and a selection of his children’s poetry, Dánta Duitse, was published in 1998. He edited the classic anthology A Treasury of Irish Love (1998) and published another volume of poetry, Syójó, in 2001. His English-language titles include Portrait of the Artist As an Abominable Snowman (1989) and Cold Moon (1993), a book of erotic haiku.
Rosenstock belongs to several international haiku associations, having translated thousands of haiku into Irish. A former chairman of Poetry Ireland, he is a member of Aosdána, a select affiliation of creative artists in Ireland. He lives in Dublin, where he works as an assistant editor for An Gúm, an Irish-language publisher.

Ned Thomas is currently Academic Director of the Mercator Centre at University of Wales Aberystwyth, a research and documentation centre which since 1987 has run projects in the fields of press and media in the regional and minority languages of Europe, the publishing of literature in translation, new media, language technology and open source software. During the same period he has played a prominent part in the activities of the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages at UK and European levels, in the Culture Committee of the Assembly of European Regions, and in connection with the Council of Europe's Charter of Regional and Minority Languages and the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (the Barcelona Declaration) on whose drafting committee he served.
His earlier career divided between publishing, journalism and university teaching. A former journalist with Times Newspapers and editor of the British Government's cultural magazine in Russian, Angliya , he has taught literature in the University of Wales, and for periods been visiting lecturer or professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain, Moscow State University, and more recently at EHESS in Paris. As well as publishing extensively in the field of European minority languages he is the author of critical studies of George Orwell, Derek Walcott and Waldo Williams.
In Wales he is known as founder-editor and publisher of the magazine Planet - The Welsh Internationalist for twenty years, and as Director for eight years of the University of Wales Press, the academic publishing house based in Cardiff. His The Welsh Extremist - a culture in Crisis achieved some success in putting the case for Welsh language rights to a wide audience during the nineteen-seventies. He is Chair of Dyddiol Cyf. a company recently set up to establish the first Welsh language daily newspaper.

The Scottish author Louise Welsh worked for many years as a dealer in second-hand, out-of-print, and antiquarian books. Her first novel, The Cutting Room (2003), draws on her knowledge of this world. In this captivating thriller, a Glasgow antiques dealer called Rilke uncovers, in a dead man's house, pictures suggesting a ‘snuff’—the slaughter of a woman for sexual purposes. Rilke finds himself compelled to unearth more about the deceased man who coveted the photographs, and becomes an unwitting detective. Though a disaffected anti-hero, ‘Rilke is so witty, self-aware, and oddly vulnerable to the occasional decent instinct that he becomes disarming,’ says Publishers Weekly. Thus unfolds a gripping tale of pornography, friendship, betrayal, greed, and the humanity that somehow survives the most horrific of human deeds.
The Cutting Room won the Crime Writers Association award for debut crime novels and the John Creasey Memorial Dagger, and has received international praise. Publishers Weekly continues, ‘Yet another talented Scottish author makes a debut with this dark and twisty thriller, boasting a highly unusual hero and a compelling background that shows extensive inside knowledge.’ Salon.com says, ‘What makes Welsh different is that the urgency and motion of the plot comes more from the way her hero is pursued by his own conscience than by any outside forces.’

Programme moderators

Alexandra Büchler was born in Prague and studied there, in Thessaloniki and Melbourne. She now lives in Great Britain and is Director of Literature Across Frontiers, a programme of international literary exchange, based at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and member of the editorial board of Transcript, European Internet Review of Books and Writing. She translates fiction, poetry, theatre plays and texts on modern art and architecture from English, Czech and Greek, and has edited six anthologies of contemporary Czech, Australian, Scottish and Greek short fiction, including This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Writing, Allskin and Other Tales by Contemporary Czech Women and Ztráty a nálezy (Lost and Found), anthology of Scottish women’s stories she edited and translated with Eva Klimentová which will be launched at Bookworld 2004. Among the many authors whose work she has translated are J. M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Jean Rhys and Janice Galloway

Damian Walford Davies is Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian literature and Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published widely on the literature and political culture of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, on Welsh Writing in English, and on Welsh literature. He writes a media column for Planet: The Welsh Internationalist and is a frequent contributor to arts programmes in Wales.

Sinéad Mac Aodha was appointed director of Ireland Literature Exchange in 2003. She had previously worked for almost eight years as the Literature Officer at the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon in Dublin. She holds a primary degree in modern languages (French and Italian) and a Masters degree in International Marketing from the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business.

Gavin Wallace is Head of Literature at the Scottish Arts Council. He obtained his first degree and Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, was an Associate Lecturer in Literature and the Humanities with the Open University in Scotland from 1991-2001, and has been active in many aspects of Scottish literature and culture as a critic, editor, and journalist. He has co-edited critical works on 20th century Scottish fiction and theatre, and was a co-editor of the journal Edinburgh Review.

Robyn Marsack was born and grew up in Wellington, New Zealand. She holds a BA from Victoria University and D.Phil from Oxford. She worked with the Carcanet Press between 1982 and 1987, first as Editorial Manager and later Director. When her husband was appointed to Glasgow University in 1987, they moved north and she worked as a freelance editor, translator from French and critic, publishing studies of Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath, and reviewing poetry regularly for Scottish newspapers. She was appointed Director of the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh in 2000, and lives in Glasgow with her husband and young daughter.

Ondřej Pilný is Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University Prague.Translator of Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, plays by J.M.
Synge, Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh. Editor of an anthology of Irish
short stories in Czech translation Farari a fanatici (2004). He co-edited Petr Skrabanek's collected essays on Finnegans Wake (Petr Skrabanek - Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers, Litteraria Pragensia 2002), and a bilingual anthology of Irish poetry.

Sioned Puw Rowlands is Director of Welsh Literature Abroad. She holds a degree in Philosophy and Modern Languages from New College, Oxford and a D. Phil in Comparative Literature from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She is a regular contributor to the literary press Wales, and is a member of the editorial board of Transcript, European Internet Review of Books and Writing. Amongst her publications are a collection of short stories Diogi a Chynhyrfu (The Idle and the Agitated, 1996), and a book of interviews with Welsh writers. Forthcoming is a book on political aesthetics in minority contexts.