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And news just in, as I literally published the last blog - Sebastian Barry's book has been longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Barry has been shortlisted twice before, "The Secret Scripture" in 2008 and "A Long Long Way" in 2005. I did feel Barry should have won the prize in 2008 for "The Secret Scripture", but he did go on to win the Costa Book of the Year. He's up against one former winner, Alan Hollinghurst, who won the prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty.

The "Man Booker Dozen" is actually 13 books in total. They are:

Author Title (Publisher)

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)

Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber)

Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail - Profile)

Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)

Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)

Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)

A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)

Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)

Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)

D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

The shortlist of six will be announced on Tuesday 6th September.

i finished reading Sebastian Barry’s new book, “On Canaan’s Side”, feeling emotionally wrung out. I haven’t had such a strong reaction to a story in a very long time. I still had a few chapters left to read as I headed into work to interview Barry. I could see that the 330pm pre record interview was coming up, but I was savouring every word. You know, how sometimes it's easy to skim read, lose whole paragraphs as you race onto the action? You can't do this with this book. You could eat every word. So I found myself listening to the end of an RTE radio interview, while Sebastian Barry waited outside the Dublin studio door and I found myself in the end game of 89 year old Lilly Bere's life, the narrator of the book, who is about to take her own life. As I heard the engineer get Sebastian set up, headphones on, and “ a bit for level” from our engineer, I had completely welled up. I blurted out to him that I was shaking and I could feel the tears in my eyes as I was talking! He liked the shaking bit. Good visceral reaction! I have been raving about “On Canaan’s Side” to friends since I started reading it last week. Right from the get go, Barry’s writing had me or was it the narrator Lilly Bere who really got me?

“What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound”. It is, the chapter heading says, “”First Day without Bill”. Bill is her grandson, whom she has reared since he was two. He is now dead. And Lilly has decided to end her own life too. It’s almost too painful to detail even here, and, while Lilly has a lot of tragedy happen to her during her life, it was her description of the loss of her beloved Bill that broke my heart. “He came into my arms like a known child” is how Barry describes the moment, gut wrenching in its simple beauty.

Barry loves his older female narrators. He bases them, he told me, on his own great aunts and Lilly, like Roseanne McNulty in “The Secret Scripture” and Annie Dunne in “A Long, Long Way” came to him fully formed. He lets them do all the talking, he says; he is just listening.

Just expect for you to be crying.

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On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber and Faber

It has been called West Belfast's Bloody Sunday. Over 36 hours between 9 and 11 August 1971,��six months before Bloody Sunday in Derry, the Parachute Regiment shot dead 11 civilians in the West Belfast housing estate of Ballymurphy. Those who were killed included the local priest Fr Hugh Mullan, and a 45-year-old mother of 8 children, Joan Connolly.

Theatre has long been used as a consciousness raising device.��Just think of the many verbatim dramas to come out of the Tricycle Theatre in London, including "Scenes from the Saville Inquiry" about Bloody Sunday. But while��the Derry families got their inquiry and the subsequent apology from PM David Cameron, there has been no apology��for the deaths in Ballymurphy. The Northern Ireland office has ruled out any public inquiry into the killings akin to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal.�� "There were cameras in Derry", ��Brenda says. "There were none in Ballymurphy." ��When��Fr Daly (later Bishop Edward Daly) lifted his white hankie, a now��iconic image, it was caught��by the photographers and news camera men there. When Fr Hugh Mullan did the same thing in��West Belfast (this time with a white babygro) ��no one captured it on camera.��

Now a specially commissioned drama by Brenda Murphy and directed by Pam Brighton is in rehearsal in Conway Mill. It's a very personal thing for the writer. She was 17 years old when she saw��the army start shooting��. Her uncle was one of the 11 killed.

While this play is based on true life events, and very personal ones,�� Murphy��is better known these days for her comic writing, including "A Night with George", about a Belfast woman who��gets to spend a night with��movie star George Clooney.

But the��families of the Ballymurphy victims��approached her on several occasions to see if she would write something. So she listened to their stories, read autopsy reports, salvaged her own memories and has created a play that deals with what happened, and what happened afterwards.

Seeing the young cast rehearsing, running��the length of the mill, as the shooting happens, is chilling in its intensity. The young guys playing the soliders��take a coffee break while I'm there, a group of them huddle��around the mock up guns. A smaller child comes up and asks "Do you think it's real?"

There��has been strong political lobbying for a public inquiry, but��what can��a theatre piece do?�� Brenda Murphy feels an apology should be forthcoming.��"It's the least people can expect".��

"Ballymurphy - The aftermath"��is at the Conway Mill from 29th July as part of the Feile an Phobail.

I opened a book today to start reading it and I stopped at the second line when��the author revealed himself to be born in 1984.��I read out the line to ��ѿ��ý Radio Ulster's Gerry Anderson who was sitting at the desk behind me catching up on the Newsnight Steve Coogan versus the News of the World debate from Friday night past. When he had finished I showed him the sentence, and he implied, in an inner city Dublin voice, that in 1984 his rear end, that is the writer's rear end(n.b. this was much more colourfully described than rear end) was the size of a button.

Gerry's comment has��stayed with me ever since this afternoon,��and now I feel that when I do get to do this interview with this��American best selling��author, columnist,��radio host and child of 1984 (ie 27 year old), I will have Gerry Anderson's faux Dublin accent and earthy description colouring my discussion.������

2013 is the 400th anniversary of the building of Derry's walls. But I can reveal that��a groundbreaking project to mark the four century old relationship between Derry~Londonderry and the City of London is due to be premiered in the summer of 2013. A new cantata created by Pulitzer prize winning poet Paul Muldoon and composer Mark Anthony Turnage is to be written which will be played��in a simultaneous performance��by the London Symphony Orchestra��in London and Camerata Ireland in Derry, playing in the two Guildhalls.

It's an incredible��creative partnership between Turnage, who has already brought the life of troubled icon Anna NIcole Smith to life on the stage of the Royal Opera House��, and Armagh born Pulitzer prize winning poet Paul Muldoon.��Even more incredible are the number of leading cultural bodies from Derry and London who have been working on this idea for the past 2 years, including the Verbal Arts Centre, Wall2Wall Music, the City of London Festival, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the LSO, Camerata Ireland and the Barbican in the City of London.

The historic and often troubled relationship between Derry~Londonderry and the City of London started when the City of London and 55 of the London Livery companies were told by Royal Charter to take part in the Plantation of Ulster. The Honourable the Irish Society, a group of members of the City of London Corporation was formed in 1613. It was��they who��built the walls of the city and��it's them, with the City of London, who have put up the money to jointly commission��the new piece.

There's an inscription on the foundation stone of St Columb's Cathedral, built by the Hon the Irish Society, that says "If Stones could speak then London's praise should sound for those who built this church and city from the ground".

Derry~Londonderry has the title of UK City of Culture 2013 and thousands are streaming across the newly opened Peace Bridge over the River Foyle. But there is still a note of tension around whether the Walls can be celebrated. While London built "this city", it's a very different city now,��even if the walls remain intact and the Maiden City remains unbreached.�� Turnage and Muldoon have yet to meet but it's expected to happen soon in Derry.������

Brendan Kennelly rarely does press interviews. For his 75th birthday this year, he did RTE's The Late Late Show, but my producer got him to agree to an interview with me.��I met him in the English department of Trinity College Dublin. I studied there in the mid 80's and Kennelly was one of my tutors. I remember he was so popular with students from other courses, it was hard to get a seat sometimes!

To find myself sitting opposite him, surrounded by Old English books on Anglo-Saxon and Piers Plowman in the English departmental library, was slightly surreal. The last time I spent time with him was around 1988, meeting him on O'Connell Bridge in Dublin, and being invited for a drink. He was on the water, having had his last drink of anything stronger a few years previous. I had a pint of something, and remember doing figures of 8 on my bicycle back out to Ranelagh.

Still off the drink 26 years later, he says it was a young doctor who told him in the early 80's that if he didn't stop drinking he would be dead within a few years. Something got through and he gave up. If I could meet that doctor I would give her the biggest hug for saving one of Ireland's greatest living poets and a man whose company it is a pleasure to be in.

My interview with Brendan Kennelly��goes out this Tuesday 12th��July in an Arts Extra special 1830-1900 and will be on the bbc iplayer for the following 7 days.

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I recorded an Arts Extra special for broadcast next Tuesday the 12th July. The basic premise of the show is that while the summer music festivals are in full swing across the UK and Ireland, what is the state of the music industry in Northern Ireland when the festival season winds up?

David Holmes who has just produced Cashier Number 9's new album "To the Death of Fun" spoke to me from LA where he talked about it never being more tough than now for bands. Stuart Baillie��said he remembered when he was working for��NME in London that most Northern Irish bands who would send on their demos would almost have an "apology strap" that they were from NI on it. Cormac Neeson lead singer with The Answer has just spent the past 2 years on the road with AC/DC, a huge break for a band from Downpatrick to achieve but before the recording started I said to him that for quite a few of Arts Extra's listeners we might have to spell out who The Answer is.��

We play new music from some other bands that I have to admit��I hadn't��heard of and had to quickly ask Stuart Baillie during the tape��had I spelt them right! He dealt with my slight air of panic and out of depth-ness with good grace!��But I'm not the only one to find myself in unfamiliar territory. The Dept of Trade and Industry (DETI) is actively courting new music here,��music tourism Stuart says is something he had never heard of until a few years ago.

Future Chaser a Derry band and side project of one half of the Derry band The Wonder Villains has won the Tourist Board competition to have their music on the tv ad campaigns to promote here. Music tourism is big business and with MTV on the way to Belfast its set to get even bigger. Book your front row seats for bands whose names you don't know now. You can say you saw them before they were huge. I have a very fond memory of standing in the pouring rain in the grounds of Prehen House last year watching The Wonder Villains play, as water came through the marquee overhead and me, two older ladies on chairs and a stray mongrel dog watched them.

You can hear more��from this edition of "Arts Extra"��on 12th July 2011 at 1830 on ��ѿ��ý Radio Ulster