Puffin Ireland established to unearth new breed of young children’s authors
Puffin, the children’s imprint of the Penguin publishing group, is setting up in Ireland. Michael McLoughlin, the Penguin Ireland managing director believes that the wealth of talented authors on the Emerald Isle can create the best-selling young children’s books of the future, both in Ireland and abroad.
Next year is Puffin’s 70th birthday and Puffin Ireland will publish its first books as part of the anniversary celebrations.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis; Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce; Charlotte’s Web by EB White; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and Watership Down by Richard Adams are among the iconic titles on the Puffin list. Best-selling Irish writer Eoin Colfer, famous for his Artemis Fowl books, is also a bright star in the Puffin constellation.
Writers can submit manuscripts to Puffin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin.
Also in Ireland…
The Faber Academy will begin a six-month course Writing a Novel from Start to Finish in Dublin next month. The novel-writing course, based at the Winding Stair bookshop on Ormond Quay, will take the form of weekly evening workshops and monthly day-long seminars on Saturdays.
Guest lecturers will include Anne Enright, Joseph O’Connor, Hugo Hamilton, Claire Keegan and Claire Kilroy and they will address issues such as plotting, editing and presenting of a novel.
16 places are available on the course, but one participant chosen on merit will be awarded a fellowship and will not have to pay the €3,000 fee.
Patrick Keogh, head of the Faber Academy, said that he sees Ireland as a place “that is wrapped up in the idea of storytelling, both the written and the spoken word”.
Participants will be chosen based on the quality of their submitted and all applicants must send a sample of their prose fiction no longer than 1,000 words to the Faber Academy before September 11th.
The Faber Academy has been offering similar courses in Britain for almost a year and most of them have sold out quickly. Applications close next Friday for the course which starts on October 7th. See www.faberacademy.co.uk for more details.
Posted: September 4th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Eoin Colfer
Do you have something to add to this post? Please leave a comment
Book of the Month
Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill
Some doors are better left closed . . . In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And its been that way for fifty years. Until the night watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life forever.
Latest interviews
Interviews plus question and answer sessions with authors, narrators and publishers.
Must-reads
The following reviews are of books that begin the very best fantasy series available.
Special Feature: Fantasy Book Review talks to the Book View Cafe
Book View Cafe is a cooperative site created by a group of writers - including internationally renowned authors Katharine Kerr, Ursula Le Guin and Vonda N. McIntyre - who want to take advantage of the internet's possibilities for reaching a wider audience and to distribute their work directly to their readers. The Book View Cafe is a place where you can find free, original fiction plus the authors' best and out-of-print work for a fee. Fantasy Book Review spoke to Book View Cafe member, science fiction author and memoirist Chris Dolley in February 2010.
Special Feature: Understanding the author of Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, the elusive author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, has been the subject of enduring fascination for the past hundred years. The destruction of many major documents about his personal life by his descendants has only magnified the mystery. Jenny Woolf's biography, published to coincide with the release of the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland film, lays waste to the myths and suspicions that have obscured Carroll's reputation by placing him firmly in the context of his own time.
