Irish author Tom Duddy is the only Irish poet to make the short list for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry with his debut poetry collection, The Hiding Place.

The Hiding Place, which is published by Arlen House, has also recently been shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Award in the UK.

The winner pf the prize will be announced on 25 November 2011 at a presentation with John Montague. The Chair of the judges is Professor Harry Clifton, Ireland Chair of Poetry.

The full shortlist for the prize is:
Tom Duddy, The Hiding Place (Arlen House)
Valerie Duff, To the New World (Salmon Poetry)
Anna Robinson, The Finders of London (Enitharmon Press)
Victor Tapner, Flatlands (Salt Publishing)
Katherine Towers, The Floating Man (Picador)

Cavan based quarterly arts & literature magazine The Moth has launched a new series of miniature poetry books.

According to the magazine, ‘The moth editions are small (at a mere 10cm high and 32 pages long) but perfectly formed. The aim of the series is to present new work by up-and-coming writers and selected work by already established writers ‒ from Ireland and abroad.’

The first four titles in the series are Some Poems by Dermot Healy, Ciarán O’Rourke, Kate Dempsey and Ted McCarthy and all will be published on 7 October 2011.

The series is edited by the editor of The Moth magazine, Rebecca O’Connor, whose collection Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust. Her poems have appeared in The Guardian, The Spectator, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Review.

The magazine was launched at the Flat Lake Festival in June 2010.

Seamus Heaney has won the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize at the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Poetry Now Festival in Dublin.

Heaney’s Human Chain was awarded the €5,000 prize on Saturday beating Sara Berkeley (The View from Here), Ciarán Carson (Until Before After), Dermot Healy (A Fool’s Errand) and Paul Muldoon (Maggot).

This is Heaney’s second victory of the prize in recent years, his previous collection, District & Circle, won the prize in 2006.

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Set in the shadow of Croagh Patrick, the Rolling Sun Book Festival aims to indulge bookworms and connoisseurs of music, song and poetry.

The festival will be opened by Harry Hughes at 9.30pm, at the Clew Bay Hotel, on Friday 12 November.

In this its first year it offers and eclectic mix of events and writers, illustrators, musicians and cooks.

Chef Tamasin Day-Lewis, illustrator PJ Lynch and journalist and author Lorna Siggins will all take part in the festival which also features writer Claire Keegan, Belinda McKeon and Paul Durcan.

The festival runs from today until Sunday 14 November and more details can be found on the festival’s Facebook page.

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>Salt Publishing, the UK based poetry publisher has launched an Irish imprint, Salt Ireland, headed by Irish Pages editor, Chris Agee.

The imprint will publish between found and six titles a year beginning in April 2011.

‘I am delighted and honoured to be invited by Salt to undertake this role,’ says Agee. ‘The Salt Ireland imprint will, uniquely, combine Irish editorial control with large British distribution. Like all other Salt titles, the imprint will produce books of the highest standard, on a par with the production values of The Gallery Press or Faber. In effect, Salt Ireland will become the island’s fifth major poetry press.’

Salt director, Chris Hamilton-Emery, said, ‘Chris Agee is a gifted editor and poet, this new appointment marks our long term commitment to new Irish writing and we all look forward to developing a significant list of the highest quality.’

The imprint will accept submissions from Irish authors, north and south of the border and will be based in Belfast.

With some 10,000 back orders for the new edition of Soundings, Gill & Macmillan Sales Director Peter Thew has ordered a third reprint of the title.

Although it only reached the stores in early October, the book has already sold out in many locations and reached the top ten in its first week, selling just under 1,000 units in the space of a few days.

According to the company, ‘Bookshops have been inundated with requests for Soundings.’

Adrian White of Dubray Books said ‘we’d anticipated Soundings tapping into a rich vein of nostalgia and proudly featured the book as a Dubray recommends title for October, but we had no idea it would be such an instant runaway bestseller.’

The original edition of Soundings was designed as a stopgap anthology of poetry for the Leaving Cert that ended up being used for 26 years. The new edition features a foreword by Joseph O’Connor

The publication of the new edition made headline news, an appropriate tribute to the original editor Augustine Martin who died tragically in 1995, aged just 59, almost 15 years ago to the date the book was re-launched with a family celebration in Doheny and Nesbitts.

New Island, the Dublin based publisher of literary fiction, poetry and non-fiction has laid off one full-time and two part-time staff.

A source close to the company said that the publisher will ‘continue to operate as normal, just with a reduced staff.’

Despite the lay offs, the source said, ‘all contracted titles will be published and the sales and marketing operations will continue to function as they were.’

Earlier this year, New Island launched children’s imprint Little Island.

Joseph O’Connor, Nuala O’Faolain, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes and Cecilia Ahern are among the authors that have been published by New Island.

The publisher receives funding from the Arts Council.

This article titled “Guardian first book award longlist ranges around the world” was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 27th August 2010 14.32 UTC

The past vies with the future and poetry with prose on the longlist of the 2010 Guardian first book award, which was announced today. The 10 debut titles in the running for the £10,000 award range from dystopian fiction to popular psychology, and span the globe from Somalia to Finland, Kashmir to Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent.

War stalks the pages of the best-known novel on the list, Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy, which was longlisted for the Orange prize and has already won the 2010 Betty Trask award. Mohamed takes the story of her father, who left Somalia as a boy and settled in the UK after crossing Africa, and transforms it into fiction inflected by the African tradition of praise poetry. Starting as a 10-year-old boy in 1930s Somalia and journeying through Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt to freedom in Britain, Mohamed’s main character witnesses key moments in the African experience of the second world war and embodies the itinerant experience of the Somali community.

According to the chair of the judges, the Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead, Mohamed is just one of a group of young British authors on the longlist who are expanding the territory of the novel.

“This year’s longlist brings together a younger generation of writers who have moved beyond the social realism of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and are pushing at the boundaries of realist fiction,” she said.

Armitstead also cited Rebecca Hunt, whose novel Mr Chartwell imagines the depression that haunts both Winston Churchill and a young woman in Battersea as a huge black dog, and Ned Beauman, who explores Nazism, eugenics and entomology in Boxer, Beetle, as responding to the changes in publishing and wider society with fiction that enlarges the possibilities of the novel.

Speaking to the Guardian, Beauman, who expressed his “delight” at finding himself on the longlist, agreed that there was an impulse towards experimentation, but not necessarily in imposing what he called “the literary equivalent of recessional austerity measures”.

“Paring away plot, character, humour, lyricism, humanity is more often boring than it is bold,” he said. “The Americans know this, and indeed all I did in Boxer, Beetle was smuggle a few postmodern devices across the Atlantic, but at the moment a lot of British readers seem to be falling for this idea that the most interesting fiction has to involve rather dated Modernist self-flagellation.”

After the success of projects as various as Inglourious Basterds and The Kindly Ones, he confessed himself unworried by the difficulty of attracting readers to a story which combines the Third Reich and cockroaches. “What has emerged as a bigger obstacle is that everyone finds all the characters so horrible,” he said, “which had honestly never occurred to me when I was writing it.”

Steven Amsterdam, whose episodic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming considers how we might retain our humanity in a future ruled by environmental and technological catastrophe, and Maile Chapman, whose Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto evokes life in a 1920s Finnish asylum, are the two remaining novelists on the list.

Alexandra Harris looks back at the early 20th century through a different lens in Romantic Moderns, a study of how English writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers imbued the artistic revolutions coming across the channel with a nostalgic sense of place. Daniel Swift considers the lack of imagination that powers modern warfare in Bomber County, an investigation into the death of his grandfather which was sparked by Robert Graves’s observation that the second world war produced no great poets. Basharat Peer, meanwhile, reports from the frontline of the conflict between India and Pakistan in a return to his troubled homeland of Kashmir in Curfewed Night.

Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, an exploration of how our convictions shape our lives despite being riddled with error, and Katharine Towers’s The Floating Man, a collection of poetry haunted by music and water, complete the list.

Armitstead will be joined on the judging panel by the artistic director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, the author Adam Foulds, the biographer Richard Holmes, the actor Diana Quick, the Guardian’s deputy editor, Kath Viner, and Stuart Broom from Waterstone’s, who will represent the views of five reading groups hosted in Waterstone’s bookshops around the country.

Last year’s winner was the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, for her collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly. She joined a roster of winners from the 12-year history of the award that includes Zadie Smith, Alex Ross and Jonathan Safran Foer.

The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced in late October, with the winner revealed at the beginning of December.

The longlist

Fiction

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Harvill)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (Cape)

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins)

Non-fiction

Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer (Harper Press)

Poetry

The Floating Man by Katharine Towers (Picador)

• All titles on the Guardian First Book Award longlist are available at a discount from the Guardian Bookshop. Go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or ring 0330 333 6846

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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