Trevor Byrne at the Irish Cultural Centre

If you're Irish, have a well received and selling first novel (Ghosts and Lightning) under your belt and want three months' as writer in residence in Paris, then this is the place for you.


This week at the Centre Culture Irlandais hosted a reading by Trevor Byrne, a fellow MPhiler of mine from Glamorgan (although we were in different years and only met in the flesh on Thursday), who Roddy Doyle has called ' very powerful writer'.

Trevor read in his quiet brogue a slightly ominous scene from his difficult second novel, involving at one point, for light relief, a game of dinosaur alphabet, and, to audience demand, a piece of flash fiction.

He talked about writing and passed on the following tips and hints: turn off the spell-check, it makes you edit and stops you writing; and keep on the novel everyday or it loses its urgency.

Good plan. Thanks for those Trevor, and the story of your interesting tattoo.