CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Class prejudice holds back working-class talent
Radical changes are required in the publishing industry for working-class writers to overcome the multiple challenges they face in a sector from which they are largely excluded, posits GAVIN O’TOOLE
Kit de Waal joins online fellow writers Paul McVeigh and Donal Ryan at the Listowel panel
[Gavin O’Toole]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
NOVELIST Kit de Waal told an audience in Listowel, Ireland, last Thursday that an important shift in attitudes and practices is needed in order to break the class ceiling in literature.
“Change needs to come not just by supporting working-class people to write but from the industry itself — who it employs, so that when people are reading stories from working-class writers they are understanding them — but secondly the publishing industry has to value the stories that working-class people want to write about,” she said.
De Waal was speaking during the panel A Working Class Writer is Something to Be at Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry, Ireland’s oldest literary and arts festival, first held in 1971.
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