Ogham and Dabar Books

18/05/2024

https://www.mountshannonarts.ie/sofia-andrukhovych

Sofia Andrukhovych is a writer, translator, and publicist. She has authored seven books of prose, including Milena's Summer (2002), Old People (2003), Wives of their Husbands (2005), Salmon (2007), Felix Austria (2014), Hen Constellation (2017) and Amadoka (2020), and has translated several works by

04/05/2024

Out in hardback 15 June 2024

For information:
https://www.gregdinner.com/whispers-of-ghosts

20/03/2024

20.3.24
Some people have asked me about Ukraine. I find it difficult to respond right now. Much to process. However I have left a few photos on the Instagram site () and if interested I have left impressions throughout the journey—not a journal, but rather vignettes, and my thoughts. You can find this on gregdinner.com in the ruminations (blog) section if interested.

18/03/2024

An open letter to all those in Ukraine--writers, filmmakers, young writers, local people, artists-- who have touched me more than words can say:

18 March 2024

An open letter to all at PEN Ukraine,
To those young writers from the Ivano-Frankivsk,
To the villagers and wonderful people of Chernihiv Oblast,
To the filmmakers in Kyiv and
To the wonderful people who took me by the hand in Lviv:

As I slowly make my way west back towards my home in Ireland, it is you, and Ukraine, that is etched in my memory, on my heart, in my thoughts.

What you have shown to me is immeasurable kindness, generosity, strength of spirit and hope. I am humbled at meeting so many of you and witnessing only decency and warmth. I truly am at a loss for words.

I take back west with me a bit of each of you inside. I take back memories that will last a lifetime. I take back friendship that will hold me tightly forever. I take back your hope for a future that will bring you peace, and may that be soon. I take back your creativity, your words, your images, your music. I take back you.

I simply want to say thank you to each and everyone of you who sheltered, and led, and laughed, and drank and helped me on my own journey, helping me to find my voice. A new friend from PEN Ukraine asked if I intended to write about Ukraine. My answer is complex. Your stories are your stories, there to be told and heard by you, not me. But in your humanity that you demonstrate, this I will take with me and will find its way into my journey.

I look forward to hearing all your voices in the future. I look forward to raising a glass with you all in the cities, towns, villages of Ukraine and I hope in Ireland as well.

I have been deeply touched by my journey in your country. It is a journey that I need to make: to bear witness, to understand, to find in the hearts of all that which gives meaning, and that which makes us human.

I wish all of you, your families and friends, your people only safety and kindness. Be well my many new friends. I carry you in my heart and prayers.

With only and always great kindness
Greg

21/12/2022

A blog interview with writer Greg Dinner on 'A Requiem For Hania'

Cover of “A Requiem for Hania” showing sepia photograph of railway tracks with ice on them and a forest in the distance Greg, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulat…

28/11/2022

Yad Vashem in Israel, the world Holocaust Memorial Centre, is going to keep a copy of ‘A Requiem For Hania’ in their library. The words Yad Vashem in Hebrew literally mean ‘A Memorial and a Name’. They are taken from a verse in the Book of Isaiah (56:5): "(To) them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off from memory."

‘A Requiem For Hania’ is also held in the US Holocaust Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. and at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

06/10/2022

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/06/hope-matters-ukrainian-and-international-authors-on-why-literature-is-important-in-times-of-conflict?CMP=share_btn_tw

Ten writers appearing at the Lviv BookForum, run this year in partnership with the Hay festival, discuss why we need books more than ever

25/09/2022

Shana Tova, Happy New Year, to our friends and readers wherever you may be. In particular we send our thoughts and wishes to our friends in Ukraine.

21/09/2022

DENVER READERS

REMINDER: Greg Dinner will be speaking about A REQUIEM FOR HANIA at the JAAMM FESTIVAL in Denver on Monday, 24 October, 1-3 pm. Tickets are available on the Festival Website. If you are free or can get away from work for a couple hours, do come to the talk. Please forward information to any who might be interested.
https://jaamm22-23.eventive.org/.../62e95f29817cb90ef70a0624

A REQUIEM FOR HANIA
Now available In hardback, paperback and ebook
Order from your local independent bookstore,
or from online booksellers.
www.gregdinner.com

A journey of imagination in words and filmed images including detective literary fiction and a Holocaust novel of the Warsaw Ghetto

07/05/2022

For Irish friends, there is talk on 'A Requiem For Hania' at Shannon Library, 24 May 7-8 pm. You'd be most welcome.

26/04/2022

Greg Dinner hopes to tour in the US in the autumn, speaking about 'A Requiem For Hania'. If your book group is interested in an in person or online discussion of the novel, do feel free to get in touch.

19/04/2022

'A Requiem For Hania' by Greg Dinner
Now available in paperback by order from your local bookstore or online booksellers.

One may be lost, that others may be found...
Let the Music Touch Your Heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgY0FRIYcBc

Now available at your local bookstore or online bookseller.Let the Music Touch Your Heart

01/03/2022

Given events in Ukraine, 'A Requiem For Hania' has never been more urgent a read.

25/11/2021

The Hardback of A REQUIEM FOR HANIA will be launched on January 18, 2022. This is a crux date portrayed in the novel: it is the day in 1943 when the N**i o...

13/10/2021

81 years ago today N**is ordered the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Close to 400,000 people would eventually die. A few, not many, would survive. Some lost their way, some found their way. A Requiem For Hania, novel of what was lost, what was found, out 18 January 2022.

07/09/2021

After discussing with a number of involved interests, we have decided to delay the release of 'A Requiem for Hania' until 18 January, 2022 (hardback).

This was spurred by the COVID situation. We are eager to see if we can arrange some launches/discussions/q&a's in Ireland, the US, possibly the UK. However doing such online is not as engaging as meeting with people in person, to tell stories and to learn. A 'zoom' going dark at the end of an allotted 45 minutes simply doesn't feel appropriate. Right now, COVID prevents such; we very much hope the situation might ease in 2022.

The 18 January date is important in history and as a dramatic point in the book. On 18 January, 1943, the German occupation forces in Warsaw began the 'Second Aktion' to rid the Warsaw Ghetto of all Jews. They had not expected any resistance. They were wrong. After a few days, the German withdrew, and the remaining young Jewish population began to prepare themselves to fight--and to die.

The German occupying forces, with their (mostly) Ukrainian auxillaries, did not reenter the Warsaw Ghetto until April, 1943--Passover. For a month the Jewish fighters, the ZOB, rebelled rather than submit and be transported to Treblinka. They fought with incredible bravery, against all odds, for one month until the German forces finally destroyed the Ghetto in May, 1943.

It became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The N**i forces finally succeeded in flattening the Ghetto, but they did not destroy the spirit of its fighters, and they did not succeed in their Final Solution.

In 'A Requiem For Hania', the initial rebellion leads to both loss and hope for its main character. It feels appropriate to go out with the book on this date of 18 January, and to follow a number of weeks later with the paperback version, to coincide somewhat with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

We are hoping to be part of various events in Ireland, the US, perhaps the UK and Poland in 2022. We hope you might be able to attend and will keep informed on the author's website, and here.

If any who read this have strong contacts with any appropriate organization or affiliation, or indeed at an independent bookshop that should be able to order the novel, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

12/07/2021

www.gregdinner.com is now live. Please come visit, let me know what you think!

A journey of imagination in words and filmed images including detective literary fiction and a Holocaust novel of the Warsaw Ghetto

29/03/2021

Composer Max Richter's music is deeply integral to the background and structure of Greg Dinner's A REQUIEM FOR HANIA. Here is a film by his partner Yulia Mahr of a recent composition, 'Mercy'... Both film and music are stunning and deeply moving. Take a listen.
https://youtu.be/uWrc6ihmaE0

Max Richter: MercyTaken from the upcoming album ‘Voices’, pre-order here: https://MaxRichter.lnk.to/VoicesID Listen to 'Mercy' here: https://MaxRichter.lnk.t...

24/01/2021

Very nice reviews left on Amazon for both 'A Murmuration of Starlings' and 'Narcissus in Utero'. Do leave a review if you've read, good or bad. It makes a difference.

22/01/2021

So very nice when someone you don't know gets in touch with you to say read books straight through and really like....

12/12/2020

'A Requiem for Hania' first draft completed October 2020. Ten months writing, Six years living with it. Immersed in a story that touched...

06/12/2020

Danish photographer Søren Solkær captures the dazzling, shifting shapes of flocks in flight

01/11/2020

'A Requiem For Hania'
Coming 2021/22

13/10/2020

Six years thinking and obsessing, Seven months writing, 735 pages later, the first draft of 'A Requiem for Hania' was completed today.

29/06/2020

There is now a dedicated page for Greg Dinner’s work at fb.com/dinnergreg And do follow on twitter at
twitter.com/GregDinner

07/04/2020

If you have been kind enough to purchase either book on Amazon.com, please leave a review or comment on the site. Thanks.

19/03/2020

NARCISSUS IN UTERO
A new novel, by Greg Dinner
Buy it on Amazon Worldwide
Take the Journey. Follow the Road. Review it on Amazon...

A young woman stands barefoot in the winter snow of an Upper West Side New York City street, staring at an anonymous apartment building. She wears only a light coat, below which is a blood-stained light slip. She waits with a gun in the pocket of her coat, waiting for someone she does not know. Arrested, she has no identity beyond saying her name is Fea; she says nothing about why she might have been there, why she was waiting. The FBI’s CODIS lab in Quantico returns an exact DNA footprint identity: Belle Turner, seventeen, from Durango, Colorado.

Except that couldn’t be possible: Belle Turner had been murdered in front of her Colorado home months earlier.

And even more confusing: the girl Fea has an impossible third DNA footprint match—to former FBI agent Ryker Chase, the same former agent who once had lived in the building the girl Fea watched. Watched, and waited.

Two girls. One girl. And one former FBI agent who stares into darkness and dreams. Three people tied together by events of the past, and events of the future. Three who have flown with the starlings and walked in the shadows. Thus begins a search to find out what happened to two girls, or perhaps but one girl, on a journey of secrets and memories that takes us from New York City to the haunting vistas of Southern Colorado, from the wolf-inhabited landscape of Wyoming mountain solitude to the murderous desert wastelands of New Mexico and Arizona ....

NARCISSUS IN UTERO again brings to the page the story of mysterious one-time FBI Agent Ryker Chase. Trained in the "cut and sign" tracking ways of Homeland Security Native American 'Shadow Wolf' Agents, Chase has unwillingly grafted the ability to 'see' into shadows, forcing him to wrestle with 'The Other', who may or may not be his own existential self, or perhaps is in fact one who is evil, toying with Chase, leading him. Haunting him.

The fear of oneself, the driving need to understand one's own identity, is at the heart of this new novel. ... NARICISSUS IN UTERO is the second book of the ‘The Shadow Wolf Chronicles’, following on from the earlier ‘A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS’, a post-modern mystery puzzle set largely in the harsh desert landscapes of the American West, a world of First Nations mysticism and violence.

09/03/2020

Available on Amazon and by order from bookshops. Share the page. Review it on Amazon. Consider the journey...

28/02/2020

A young woman stands barefoot in the winter snow of an Upper West Side New York City street, staring at an anonymous apartment building. She wears only a light coat, below which is a blood-stained light slip. She waits with a gun in the pocket of her coat, waiting for someone she does not know. Arrested, she has no identity beyond saying her name is Fea; she says nothing about why she might have been there, why she was waiting. The FBI’s CODIS lab in Quantico returns an exact DNA footprint identity: Belle Turner, seventeen, from Durango, Colorado.

Except that couldn’t be possible: Belle Turner had been murdered in front of her Colorado home months earlier.

And even more confusing: the girl Fea has an impossible third DNA footprint match—to former FBI agent Ryker Chase, the same former agent who once had lived in the building the girl Fea watched. Watched, and waited.

Two girls. One girl. And one former FBI agent who stares into darkness and dreams. Three people tied together by events of the past, and events of the future. Three who have flown with the starlings and walked in the shadows. Thus begins a search to find out what happened to two girls, or perhaps but one girl, on a journey of secrets and memories that takes us from New York City to the haunting vistas of Southern Colorado, from the wolf-inhabited landscape of Wyoming mountain solitude to the murderous desert wastelands of New Mexico and Arizona ....

NARCISSUS IN UTERO again brings to the page the story of mysterious one-time FBI Agent Ryker Chase. Trained in the "cut and sign" tracking ways of Homeland Security Native American 'Shadow Wolf' Agents, Chase has unwillingly grafted the ability to 'see' into shadows, forcing him to wrestle with 'The Other', who may or may not be his own existential self, or perhaps is in fact the One who is evil, toying with Chase, leading him. Haunting him.

The fear of oneself, the driving need to understand one's own identity, is at the heart of this new novel. ... NARICISSUS IN UTERO is the second book of the ‘The Shadow Wolf Chronicles’, following on from the earlier ‘A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS’, a post-modern mystery puzzle set largely in the harsh desert landscapes of the American West, a world of First Nations mysticism and violence.