NCWN

Sir Michael Parkinson, John McCarthy, Anita Desai, Paul Muldoon, Romesh Gunesekera, Kevin Barry and Anita Shreve are just some of the headliners at the 2012 West Cork Literary Festival. For this year’s festival, supported by RTÉ Radio 1, Artistic Director, Denyse Woods, has also decided to celebrate our maritime heritage—from Brendan the Navigator to Wolfe Tone, from longboats, and the French non-invasion, to the forthcoming visit of the Atlantic Challenge to Bantry with The Bantry Bay Series, which will include readings and talks based on all sorts of matters nautical, as well as a reading on an Irish Navy vessel. Another theme this year is Writers in Peril so it is apt that the first evening’s event is an interview with journalist and broadcaster John McCarthy, who was kidnapped and held for five and a half years on his on his first foreign assignment to Beirut in 1986. Throughout the week, in association with Amnesty International the festival honours those who risk their lives in order to write, report, blog and tweet for the benefit and enlightenment of us all.