Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for June meeting, 2009
[In advance of Eilis Ni Dhuibne's forthcoming visit to Castlebar Library on June 11th (see events page for more details), Castlebar Book Club is reading a selection of the author's fiction.]
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has written novels, collections of short stories, plays, children’s books, and non fiction. She is also a literary critic, whose reviews appear regularly in The Irish Times.
Born in Dublin, she was educated at Scoil Bhride, Ranelagh, Scoil Chaitriona, Eccles Street, and University College Dublin, where she studied English, Medieval Studies, and Folklore. She also spent a year as a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen while working on her doctoral thesis. In 1982 she was awarded a PhD by the National University of Ireland.
She has worked as a folklore collector and researcher, and as a librarian and archivist at the National Library of Ireland. She has taught Creative Writing at various institutions and venues: Listowel Writers’ Week, the Irish Writers’ Centre, and the Pushkin Prizes Trust. She has taught on the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, and at present teaches on the prestigious MA in Creative Writing at UCD (University College Dublin).
Her work has won many important literary awards, among others the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, three Bisto awards for her children’s books, the American Association of Irish Studies Award for Prose in English, and several Oireachtas awards for novels in Irish. Her novel The Dancers Dancing was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her short story collection, The Pale Gold of Alaska, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Her work has been translated to German, French, Spanish, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Czech, Slovenian, Russian and Japanese.
Novels (in English)
The Bray House
Singles
The Dancers Dancing
Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow
Short Story Collections
Blood and Water
Eating Women is Not Recommended
The Inland Ice
The Pale Gold of Alaska
Midwife to the Fairies
Children’s Books
The Uncommon Cormorant
Hugo and the Sunshine Girl
The Hiring Fair
Blaeberry Sunday
Penny Farthing Sally
The Sparkling Rain
Hurlamaboc
What they said…
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne is a consistently insightful and elegant writer who gloriously displays her talent for attention to detail.
Irish Independent
She endows her narratives with a capaciousness that allows them to delve beneath the surfaces of things and to sound the profundities of her protagonists’ emotions. Rather than rushing towards a predictable ending, 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.
Irish Times
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is one of a very small group of authors who write creatively in both Irish and English … She has, in her own quiet way, brought the novel in Irish into the 21st century.
Irish Times
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities