• Bookmark: Dan Hegarty (2FM)

    November 29, 2016 - By 

    RTÉ 2FM legend and author Dan Hegarty handpicks and  a selection of his favourite books, featuring Charles Bukowski, Scroobius Pip, Jack Kerouac and Richie Taylor & Tony Clayton-Lea. Photos by Peter O’Hanlon. Dan Hegarty’s Buried Treasure and Buried Treasure 2 are available to buy now via Liberties Press.  Irish Rock: Where It’s Come From, Where It’s At, and Where It’s Going – Richie Taylor & Tony Clayton-Lea This book really made me aware of how many amazing artists this little island of Ireland has offered up over the years. Prior to this, I would have known the obvious ones; great acts…

  • Bookmark: R.B Kelly

    June 16, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we spend some time with upcoming sci-fi writer R.B Kelly as she selects the books that made a huge impression on her writing. Her debut novel Edge of Heaven is available through Liberties press this month. Photos by Dee McEvoy. This Other Eden – Ben Elton This was the first adult science fiction book I ever read, and it’s what got me writing science fiction in the first place. Elton was writing about the near future as he saw it in the early nineties, and I love the way he creates a frighteningly plausible scenario…

  • Bookmark: Liam Geraghty

    March 22, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we spend a morning hanging out with RTE radio reporter and CBBC’s Brain Freeze puppeteer Liam Geraghty around some of his favourite spots in Dublin, while he shares with us the books which have influenced his life. Photos by Pedro Giaquinto. Jim Henson The Biography – Brian Jay Jones I’ve been an obsessive fan of the Muppets since I was small. My parents would often wonder how I’d recognise stars of a bygone era like Roy Rogers (who guest starred on The Muppet Show) so it quickly became a joke in our family that I…

  • Bookmark: Jan Carson

    March 16, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we spend some time with author Jan Carson in her home in Belfast as she selects the books which have influenced her own work, from Truman Capote to Flannery O’Connor. Photos by Sara Marsden. Asking a confirmed book addict to narrow their collection down to ten favourite books will never elicit a simple response. I spent hours making little piles of paperbacks across my living room floor, swapping one novel for another and feeling as if I was actually turning my back on old friends when I had to relegate Kurt Vonnegut, Marilynne Robinson and Jeffrey…

  • Bookmark: Frankie Gaffney

    March 2, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we chat to Dublin author Frankie Gaffney about the books that have made the biggest impression on his life thus far. Photos by Pedro Giaquinto. I’ve split my list into fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction tends to get neglected, but it influences my writing every bit as much as fiction. Non-Fiction A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson This book gently and briefly explains what’s currently known about the universe: the very basics of the cosmos, our planet, and the life that inhabits it. For some reason they don’t really teach you the broad…

  • Bookmark: Kevin Curran

    February 23, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, Dublin author Kevin Curran selects and talks about some of his favourite novels, featuring the likes of Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo and F Scott Fitzgerald. Curran has just recently published his second novel Citizens. Photos by Pedro Giaquinto. James Kelman  – A Disaffection A brilliant, if under-appreciated writer brings us a ground-breaking use of vernacular language that would later be made famous by Irvine Welsh. Not as brash as Welsh, but more gritty and stylistically accomplished, A Disaffection is a powerful book about twenty-something despair and isolation in a world that doesn’t care. Saul Bellow –…

  • Bookmark: Shawna Scott (Sex Siopa)

    February 5, 2016 - By 

    In the latest installment of Bookmark, Seattle-born Shawna Scott of Dublin’s Sex Siopa selects and talks about her some of her all-time favourite books. Photos by Melanie Mullan. Girl Trouble by Carol Dyhouse This is the book I’m reading at the moment. I picked it up in the Wellcome Museum bookshop when I was in London last month. It’s brilliant! It’s a brief history of moral panics over the past 150 or so years. Not surprising, when there’s a moral panic, it’s almost always about women. From the suffragettes’ involvement in the “white slavery” panic to the post-war rise of…

  • Bookmark: Colin White

    January 27, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we pop in to visit Dublin author and photographer Colin White, as he selects the books that inspire him the most. Colin has recently released two books, one on Dalymount Park and the other on Native Irish Dogs. Photos by Melanie Mullan. Strumpet City by James Plunkett Far and away my favourite Irish novel, Strumpet City paints Dublin in exactly the light necessary to accurately portray the lives of the city’s dwellers on all sides of the political sphere around the time of the 1913 Lock-out. The misery endured in the city’s tenements is evident throughout, as too is the resolute…

  • Bookmark: Patrick Freyne (Irish Times)

    January 19, 2016 - By 

    By way of Trumpan Capote, John Steinbeck and more, Irish Times features writer Patrick Freyne waxes passionate about some of all-time favourite books. Photos by Aidan Kelly-Murphy All the Narnia books by CS Lewis I read these in the wrong order when I was six. I reread them every few years. The books’ supposedly central Christ allegory went right over my head. I just thought it was about some school children, a lion god and a world of talking animals that could be accessed by getting into old furniture. It made the real world seem boring. I still check the back of…

  • Bookmark: Caitriona Lally

    November 4, 2015 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we head over to the cosy home of Irish writer Caitriona Lally, author of Eggshells which was chosen by The Irish Times Book Club as their book of the month for October. She has just been shortlisted by the Irish Book Awards 2015 for the Newcomer of the Year award. Photos by Melanie Mullan. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller For his fearlessness and honesty and rawness and laugh-out-loud sentences. The kind of book that changes the way you think about fiction, that makes you think a more powerful, more real kind of writing is possible. Oranges Are…