Two Cities One Book Festival
This year’s Dublin: One City One Book Festival will become the Two Cities One Book Festival as a special tribute to the 2016 commemoration programme. The programme for the festival was launched this week.
Dublin will be joining Belfast for a combined festival. The programme stretches across two cities with 70 events to be held during the month of April.
Every year a novel is chosen to be read during the festivities and this year it is Lia Mills’ novel Fallen , published by Penguin Random House. Fallen tells the story of Dubliners against the backdrop of the dramatic events of World War I and the Easter Rising of 1916.
A big book club will come together with readers from both Dublin and Belfast to read and discuss this fabulous novel.
The author of Fallen, Lia Mills commented: “Fallen is dedicated to the city of Dublin, so I’m beyond delighted that the city has chosen it for its One City One Book festival this year. I’m especially happy that Dublin and Belfast have made it a joint selection, and that book clubs in Dublin have been twinned with book clubs in Belfast to read it. The programme is impressive and ranges far beyond one novel: it’s a celebration of reading, and highlights the great and necessary work that librarians and libraries do in our communities.”
Other festival highlights include a Two Cities One Book Day in Belfast on the 16th April and a Two Cities Book Day in Dublin on the 29th April. The Two Cities One Book Day includes a tour of the ‘Proclaiming a Republic’ Exhibition in the National Museum. Then there will be a flagship event held on the 20th April in ‘Findlater’s’ Church, Parnell Square, called All Sorts of Wild Reports. The play will feature actors, musicians and singers performing extracts from diaries and letters of a diverse group of women who experienced the Rising at first hand.
Students still have time to enter the ‘Write Here, Write Now 1916, A Story of Ireland’ creative writing competition. For more details on this you can visit http://www.hotpress.com/writeherewritenow/. For full details on the Two Cities One Book Festival go to www.dublinonecityonebook.ie/programme.
Hashtags: #TwoCtiesOneBook 
