To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Class prejudice holds back working-class talent
Radical changes are required in the publishing industry for working-class writers to overcome the multiple challenges they face in a sector from which they are largely excluded, posits GAVIN O’TOOLE
Kit de Waal joins online fellow writers Paul McVeigh and Donal Ryan at the Listowel panel
[Gavin O’Toole]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
NOVELIST Kit de Waal told an audience in Listowel, Ireland, last Thursday that an important shift in attitudes and practices is needed in order to break the class ceiling in literature.
“Change needs to come not just by supporting working-class people to write but from the industry itself — who it employs, so that when people are reading stories from working-class writers they are understanding them — but secondly the publishing industry has to value the stories that working-class people want to write about,” she said.
De Waal was speaking during the panel A Working Class Writer is Something to Be at Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry, Ireland’s oldest literary and arts festival, first held in 1971.
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