Eoin Purcell

Cruelly Unprepared
I went to the Irish Book awards on Wednesday 6th May (thanks to the generosity of Lightning Source) and I foolishly forgot to take either a proper camera or a proper recorder. I was left relying on my Nokia E61i which is in my opinion a very bad media collecting device. On the plus side it did allow me to twitter the results of which you can see here (aren’t hastags great!)!

But other’s were not
The only interesting or useful piece of media I captured at the event itself was a short audio clip of Edna O’Brien as she accepted her Lifetime Achievement award. It is just a snatch of a very good speech which has been proceeded by a wonderful introduction by the remarkably charismatic Seamus Heaney. Fortunately RTÉ comes up trumps on media. Tubridy has some Irish Book Awards pictures on his website, the Entertainment pages have a decent covering story and Morning Ireland carried a great piece the next morning with contributions from both O’Brien and Heaney (that link will launch a player)!

Winners & Losers
If you just want the winners you can get them on the book awards site or on the Irish Playwrights and Screen Writers Guild Blog or this round up story about the awards on Independent.ie. As a final media gem, Ryan Tubridy had an interview the next day with double award winner Sebastian Barry (though you’ll need to wade through the whole show to find it!) who is in the States right now was was represented by his publisher Faber.

All told the evening went down a storm and was ahuge success, great for books and authors as a whole I think!
Eoin