The inaugural Rush Festival of Writing was a huge success with the event selling out within weeks of being announced. Some of the one-day festival’s highlights included John Banville, who will be appearing in conversation with Kevin Curran (author of YOUTH, Beatsploitation) at the Millbank Theatre. With his 2006 novel Christine Falls chosen for this year’s One Dublin One Book initiative, the Irish literary icon discussed both that book and his extensive career.

Mr. Banville said in a recent Irish Independent interview to promote Rush Festival of Writing: “I love small festivals. Wonderful thing about those festivals; local people come. It’s not just people swanning around in Panama hats and flowered frocks and drinking champagne, it’s local people who come in because they’re interested.”

The response to the Plot Twists panel with Catherine Ryan Howard and Andrea Mara at the Millbank Theatre was equally enthusiastic, as crime fiction continues to prove immensely popular with audiences.
Other events included Sinéad Gleeson (Constellations, Hagstone) sharing a panel with author Anna Carey (Our Song, Love Scene) in Pen to Paper: A Conversation on Writing. Sinéad is an internationally celebrated essayist and novelist, while Anna has written for both children and adults. The esteemed Belinda McKeon (Tender, Solace) also hosted a Creative Writing workshop at Rush Library for adults, that focused on the basis of storytelling for fiction writers, as well as how to create vivid characters.

Festival co-founders Lauren Murphy and Sean Smith said: “It’s been so gratifying to see how enthusiastically people have responded to the first Rush Festival of Writing. We always thought that there was an appetite for a literary festival in Rush, and the speed at which tickets were sold or booked out - within a month of being announced - proves that our hunch was correct!