Re: Re: North Georgian Dublin

@kinsella wrote:

It’s not a wholly ignorant comment. Those writers you mention, whilst great, are not of the intellectual or artistic calibre of Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, Swift, Wilde etc…

In any case, as Melbourne and Iowa have also been recipients of this accolade, I wouldn’t put a great deal of stock in it. 😉

Well if the criterion was the number of great writers born in the city, and how great they are, then I think Dublin would be near the top of the list, probably behind London and Paris and other world cities. However, of all the writers you named, only Swift actually lived in Dublin during most of his creative life or made a continuing contribution to the intellectual life there.

Iowa and Melbourne are apparently regional hubs for spreading literature and the virtues of creative writing to the masses, which seems to be an important criterion for city of literature status. Dublin, quite simply, is not, whereas Edinburgh is. I don’t see any huge attempt to teach Dublin or Irish schoolchildren creative writing skills, or indeed a huge budgetary commitment to the development of contemporary literature. Dublin likes to focus on dead white males for tourism purposes, rather than being a particularly vibrant source of modern literature. So maybe Dublin should focus on that if it wants to be the world’s greatest literary city.

Oh, and maybe also not greenlighting the demolition of homes believed to be the birthplaces of major writers in the English language would also be helpful.