The Sigla Blog

Oscar Wilde once said: “A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction”. For Lucy Grealy, the former is true and the latter is possibly the reason why she was a writer at all. This IS an autobiography, but focuses on a specific aspect of the author’s life. That this […]

Sometimes the most fascinating literary crimes are the ones that happen for real. Forget the cult of celebrity and Hello magazine, nothing grabs the public attention faster than real-life murder, especially one that at first, appears to be motiveless. Truman Capote was handed the guts of a brilliant script when he decided to write about […]

Edited by Evelyn Conlon & Hans-Christian Oeser
In his book ‘The Short Story’, Sean O’Faolain reminisces about the time he taught creative writing in London. One young man submitted a story about an aristocratic man, living on his country estate who sat in his library quaffing brandy and cigars. When O’Faolain - who knew this young […]

If you’ve seen the 1973 film The Exorcist in recent years, everything from the dodgy make-up to the piano wire that elevates Linda Blair’s possessed body looks dated and laughable. However, it’s not that long ago since the film was banned in Ireland. And since we’re talking 1970s Ireland, a film that contains scenes where […]

Sinéad Gleeson finds Michael Winterbottom’s controversial new film an exercise in pointlessness.

John Lydon of The Sex Pistols once said that love is “two minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises”. In his new film ‘9 Songs’, Michael Winterbottom has taken Lydon’s metaphor of sexual brevity and padded it out to about 35 minutes of sex, […]

Bonnie Prince Billy & Matt Sweeney
Superwolf ****
BPB aka Will Oldham is one of those consistently good musicians that when a new album comes out, you fear . for about 10 seconds . that it won’t be as good as his last one - and then it turns out to be bloody amazing. Which is […]

Walter Salles goes behind the face that launched a thousand t-shirts and examines a deep friendship and how one crazy summer on the road can change your life forever.

It’s hard to forget that it is 37 years since the death of Ernesto Che Guevara when Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait still dominates T-shirts the world over. […]

If it’s not enough that the American right loathes you, Michael Moore is even losing favour with the left. The filmmaker many love to hate has been dogged by controversy well ahead of the release of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ in Ireland. The company originally responsible for distribution pulled out after it “got calls from Republican friends” […]

Earlier this year on holidays, I was sharing a room with a friend who was reading The Diving-bell and the Butterfly. This proximity and much lolling around gave me an insight into how a book can literally make you think out loud. Maybe if I hadn’t been there, she would not have articulated - involuntarily […]

Drag queens, drug addiction and homosexuality are not high on the average filmmaker’s agenda, let alone when they’re all in the same movie. But then Pedro Almodovar is not exactly James Cameron is he? Sinead Gleeson looks at his career after seeing his new work ‘Bad Education’.
Like his compatriot Picasso, you only have to mention […]

Benedict Kiely, one of Ireland’s best-known broadcasters, storytellers and short story writers published The Captain with the Whiskers in 1960. Reissued now by Methuen, set at a specific era in Ireland’s recent history but is a story for all times. The young protagonist Owen Rodgers lives in a small village, based loosely on an Ulster […]

Once a guarantee of literary gravitas, book prizes have fallen victim to the cult of celebrity and massive publicity machines. As the Whitbread prize is announced this month, Sinéad Gleeson asks if such awards are no more proof of a great novel than books endorsed by TV bookclubs.
The Whitbread Prize, one of the bastions […]