WRITERS

Jacques-Pierre Amette 
La Maîtresse de Brecht (2003)
(France)
Jacques-Pierre Amette is a journalist, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. His

first work, Congé, was published when hewas twenty-two years old and was noticed by Le Figaro Littéraire. He started working for Ouest France, then for the Nouvelle Revue Française and The New York Times, where he was their French Caribbean correspondent, and finally for Le Point where he is a literary reviewer. He has written extensively since the critical success of his first novel. Of his sixteen published novels, two have won literary prizes. He won the Prix Goncourt for La Maîtresse de Brecht. He is also the author of five novellas, winning the Prix Roger Nimier for Confessions d’un enfant gâté, ten plays and over eighty pieces for radio. He has also worked with Antenne 2 and Canal+ to produce several screenplays.

Sebastian Barry
A Long Long Way (2005)
(Ireland)
A  dramatist,  Sebastian  Barry  was born  on  5  July  1955   in  Dublin   and 

educated at Trinity College, Dublin. His academic posts include Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995-6). His early plays include Boss Grady's Boys (1988), which won the BBC/Stewart Parker Award. His play The Steward of Christendom (1995) was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in March 1995 and won several prizes. Our Lady of Sligo (1998) was joint winner of the Peggy Ramsay Play Award, and was seen off-Broadway, while Hinterland, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Royal National Theatre, London in 2002. His latest play is Whistling Psyche (2004). Barry has also written poetry, including the collections The Water-Colourist (1983) and Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1989); a novel for children, Elsewhere: the Adventures of Belemus (1985); and a short novel, Time Out of Mind / Strappado Square (1983). His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), translated into seven languages, and Annie Dunne (2002), set in Wicklow in the 1950s. He is a member of Aosdána.

Frédéric Beigbeder
L’Égoïste Romantique (2005)
(France)
Frédéric Beigbeder was born in 1965, in  Neuilly-sur-Seine.  He  attended  the

lycées Montaigne and Louis le Grand, and then studied at Sciences-Po, graduating at 24 years of age. From the age of 25 he became involved in a range of activities including writing, advertising, literary journalism and feature writing. In 1994, he created the "Prix de Flore", named after the famous café of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. This annual prize rewards a young, emergent French author who shows talent. Frédéric Beigbeder is a very controversial and contradictory figure who loves to cut a dash and to create multiple images of himself. Yet, at the same time, he reveals his true self in his auto-fictions. In his book 99F (re-christened 14.99 euro) published by Folio in 2000, he denounces the advertising world, even though he remained in that world for 10 years. In 2003, he published Windows on the World (Folio), a story about the last moments of the clients in a restaurant in the World Trade Centre on the 11 September 2001. He has also written the script of a cartoon, Rester normal à St Tropez (Dargaud, 2004), with drawings by Philippe Bertrand. His latest novel, entitled L’Égoïste Romantique (2005) has just been published by Grasset.

Jean Bleakney 
The Poet’s Ivy (2003)
(Northern Ireland)
Jean Bleakney was born in Newry in 1956. A former biochemist in medical

research, she has published two collections of poetry with Lagan Press : The Ripple Tank Experiment (1999) and The Poet's Ivy (2003). Her work has appeared in several anthologies, most recently New Soundings, edited by Daragh Carville (Blackstaff Press, 2003) and The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). She now lives in Belfast where, in addition to writing, she works in a garden centre.

Christian Cailleaux 
Les Imposteurs, Acte III (2005)
(France)
Christian Cailleaux  was  born  in the suburbs  of  Paris,  in  La  Garenne-

Colombes. He studied Arts & Philosophy at university and then went on to study at the Ecole Nationale d’Art de Cergy. He started to work as an illustrator (children’s magazines, travel and general magazines), and also worked in advertising. He has travelled widely and lived in Africa, teaching drawing in the Cultural Centres and Alliances Françaises of some fifteen different African countries. This experience inspired his first professional publication in comic form about ten years ago, Les aventures d’Arthur Blanc-Nègre, and two albums, published by Dargaud, based on a text by Sallé. With Dargaud Publishers, he proceeded to write the scenario and do the drawings for his next publications: Haëllifa and Harmattan, le vent des fous. Le café du voyageur and Le troisième thé were then published by the independent publisher, Treize Etrange. A trilogy, Les Imposteurs (the third part of which has just been published) is his first work with Casterman.

Celia de Fréine
Fiacha Fola (2004)
(Ireland)
Celia de Fréine is a poet, screenwriter and   dramatist.   She    was   born   in 

Northern Ireland and now divides her time between Dublin and Connemara. Two collections of poetry in Irish, Faoi Chabáistí is Ríonacha (2001), and Fiacha Fola (2004), have been published by Cló Iar-Chonnachta. A collection in English, Scarecrows at Newtownards, is due in 2005. She has also been widely anthologised and has won several awards, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Duais Chomórtas Filíochta Dhún Laoghaire, the British Comparative Literature Association Translation Award, Duais Aitheantais Ghradam Litríochta Chló Iar-Chonnachta, Duais Smurfit /Lá, and Gradam Litríochta Chló Iar-Chonnachta. Many of her plays have been performed including, most recently, Anraith Neantóige, which was produced by Aisling Ghéar in 2004. She has twice won the Oireachtas na Gaeilge award for best play. She was awarded Arts Council Bursaries in 1997 and in 2000.

Louis de Paor
Agus Rud Eile De (2002)
(Ireland)
Born in Cork in 1961, Louis de Paor has    been     involved     with     the 

contemporary  renaissance of poetry in Irish since 1980 when he was first published in the poetry journal Innti which he subsequently edited for a time. A four-time winner of the Seán Ó Ríordáin/Oireachtas Award, the premier award for a new collection of poems in Irish, he lived in Australia from 1987 to 1996. His first bilingual collection, Aimsir Bhreicneach/Freckled Weather, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Literary Translation. He was also granted a Writer’s Fellowship by the Australia Council in 1995. He is the recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award 2000, the first poet in Irish to achieve that distinction. His most recent collection, Agus Rud Eile De, published by Coiscéim in December 2002, was awarded the Oireachtas prize for the best collection of poems in Irish in 2003. 

Emmanuel Dongala
Johnny Chien Méchant (2002)
(Congo)
Emmanuel Dongala  was   born   in 1941  of  a  Congolese  father  and  a 

Central African Republic mother. He studied chemistry in the US and France and taught at the University of Brazzaville, a town he had to flee during the civil war that ruined the Congo in 1997. He has published five books: Un fusil dans la main, un poème dans la poche (1973), Jazz et vin de palme (1982), Le feu des origines (1987), Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (1988), and Johnny Chien Méchant (2002). He is the winner of the prestigious Prix Fonlon-Nichols 2003 for excellence in creativity, human rights and freedom of expression. His collection of short stories, Jazz et Vin de Palme, published in 1982, was banned by the Marxist-Leninist Congolese government of the time. The ban was only lifted in 1990. His novels and stories have been translated from French into some twelve languages.

Tarek Eltayeb
The Palm Tree House (2004)
(Austria)
Tarek Eltayeb was born in 1959 in Cairo of  Sudanese parents. He grew

up in Cairo and Al-Arish, Sinaï. Since 1984 he has lived in Vienna where he studied Social and Economic Science at the University of Vienna. He is a lecturer at the International Management Centre of Krems, Austria and also works as a translator [Arabic/German]. During his time as a student he worked as a newspaperman for the Kronen Zeitung, an experience which has become an inspiration for some of his literary texts where he presents a different outlook on the situation of freelance journalists. Tarek Eltayeb, whose literary work has been translated into Arabic, French and German, started writing in 1985. He has published two collections of poetry and one novel in German, published by Selene editions in Vienna. His novel, Städte ohne Dattelpalmen (Cities without date palm trees), has put him on the literary map in German-speaking countries. 

Peter Fallon
The Georgics of Virgil (2004) 
(Ireland)
Peter Fallon was born in Germany in 1951 but has l951 but has lived in

Ireland since 1957. He founded The Gallery Press in 1970, and has edited and published more than 300 books of poetry and plays by Irish writers. His poetry collections include The Speaking Stones (1978); Winter Work (1983); The News and Weather (1987); Eye to Eye (1992); The Deerfield Series: Strength of Heart (1997) and News of the World, Selected and New Poems (1998). With Derek Mahon he has edited, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990). He has been Poet-in-Residence in Trinity College, Dublin, and twice in Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts, USA. In 1993 he received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute. In 2000 he was inaugural Heimbold Professor at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. The Georgics of Virgil (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, will be republished next year by Oxford University Press in its World’s Classics Series. A member of Aosdána, he lives in Loughcrew, County Meath.