Over the last weekend, Bray Literary Festival opened its doors for its fifth and final edition. Running from Thursday to Sunday, the festival offered over 20 events, featuring the likes of Donal Ryan, Claire Keegan and Kevin Power among many others as speakers. The events themselves covered a broad range of literary topics. From interviews to publishing advice and poetry readings to lectures, the festival had it all.
Of the wide array of events, “An Afternoon with Donal Ryan” stood out, a conversation held on stage at the Mermaid Arts Centre between writer Donal Ryan and Tanya Farrelly, author and organiser of the festival. Ryan was at ease, conversing with Farrelly about his newly released novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, and his writing process. Over the course of the next hour, the author delved into his typical rural Irish settings, which he specified were supposed to reflect the innocence of his childhood and the feeling of wonder not lost.
Ryan also discussed the unique structure of The Queen of Dirt Island. Each chapter is contained within five hundred words, a stylistic choice which Ryan revealed arose from the fact that “five hundred words fit perfectly on my computer screen”. Ryan, like his novels, is extremely humorous and kept the audience laughing throughout.
From here the festival moved down the street to the town hall, a Tudor Revival building with an anachronistic McDonald’s sadly lodged within its first floor. Upstairs, the next event began: novelist and Trinity lecturer Kevin Power’s presentation entitled “Rescue Attempts”. Over the next hour, Power talked about his conception of one’s multiple selves and how we construct these versions of ourselves to justify our present.
Power’s adolescent self, for example, grew up in the suburbs of Dublin, a place of mundanity and no great trouble. Power discussed how in becoming a writer, he felt he was “rescuing” his past self – but didn’t know exactly from what. After achieving literary success with Bad Day in Blackrock, Power had made a place for himself within the ostensible prestige of academia, only to feel that he needed to be rescued again. In his lecture, Power posited that these impulses – the lifebuoys we throw out to ourselves – are not rescue attempts as much as they are actually moments of self-reconstruction, when a past narrative falls apart and a new one is born.
The day finished with two further events. In a talk organised in celebration of Dedalus Books’ 40th anniversary, founder Eric Lane read out some excerpts. He also discussed his founding of the independent publishing company that focuses on publishing works of a “distorted reality, where the bizarre, the unusual, the grotesque and the surreal meld in a kind of intellectual fiction which is very European”. Lane commented on the challenges of running such a publishing house, alongside two of Dedalus’ Irish writers, Eoghan Smith and Dara Kavanagh. Excitingly, Kavanagh, author of Prague 1938, stripped away his pseudonym and revealed himself to be acclaimed author and poet David Butler during the event.
The day’s last event was a poetry reading featuring Luke Morgan, Molly Twomey and Victoria Kennefick, concerning the themes of ‘Body, Shame, and Identity’. The poems, which covered adolescence, anorexia and maternal relations among other subjects garnered great applause and made for a perfect end of the day.
The sunshine continued into the final day, which opened with a conversation about how writers respond to crises. Author Rosemary Hennigan of The Truth Will Out, Poet Maria McManus and Tony Daly, co-ordinator for the charity 80:20, sat down for an hour in Bray Library to indulge in the topic of how the implications of the world contribute and merge with writers’ works.
This was followed by a conversation with the festival director, Tanya Farrelly, and author Susan Knight. Both were perfect candidates to hold this conversation, Farrelly a literary crime author of novels such as The Girl Behind The Lens and When Your Eyes Close, and Knight has authored seven novels surrounding Sherlock Holmes’s landlady, Mrs Hudson, who travels the world solving crimes. This event was one of the highlights of the festival.
Knight’s elucidation of her process when creating a novel was especially titillating. She stresses the necessity of giving the female detective a narrative voice. “It’s nice to be able to give a feminist perspective,” she says. “She’s able to read the woman. I’ve got to like her very much. She became quite waspish in some way.”
After reading a few extracts from her latest novel Mrs Hudson Goes to Paris, I found the humour within her writing striking. When asked about it, following the backdrop of audience laughter, Knight comments: “Humour does come quite naturally to me. You need humour sometimes to lighten the stories, and I just enjoy putting it in.” She continues, saying, “I love the idea of it not just being a crime novel but being a novel you can enjoy for other reasons. It’s all about characters, relationships and colour”.
There were two more events after this. The first was a sold-out evening with Claire Keegan, interviewed by author David Butler, held in the Mermaid Arts Centre. Keegan’s conversation was primarily centred around her award-winning novel Small Things Like These, which is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The festival then closed back in Bray Library with a final conversation between poets Rosamund Taylor and Colin Dardis about writing and neurodivergence.
The final Bray Literary Festival, the last in a five-year run, did not disappoint. The poets, authors and all of the other speakers were all connected by literature, but the festival provided audiences with a diverse catalogue of different themes and topics. Though the festival has ended, the sense of community built by the attendees, the speakers and the organisers surely has not, and this loss will be felt throughout the community of writers and readers. The Bray Literary Festival provided a place for like-minded, genuine literary discourse and was held solely for the love of reading. It will surely be missed.
