Irish literary heavyweight Colm Tóibín has stepped down as president of the long-running Listowel Writers’ Week Festival after its announcement that the volunteers who had run the festival since its launch in 1971 were to be replaced with a professional literary curator. Tóibín voiced his support for the volunteers, expressing the opinion that the festival has genuine roots in Listowel because of its literary community.
Artist and poet Fiona Hooper, from Crawley, whose mother is in a care home due to Alzheimer’s, crowdfunded more than £1,400 for Alzheimer’s Research UK when she published her collection The Poetry of Painting.