James Joyce celebrations flourish on Molly Bloomsday

This week, Naomi Klein became the first ever winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction for her study of truth in politics, Doppelganger, while VV Ganeshananthan took home the fiction prize for her story set during the Sri Lankan civil war, Brotherless Night. Scroll down to find out which books both winners have loved lately.

And today is 16 June, the day James Joyce’s Ulysses is set, which means that fans will be celebrating Bloomsday – or, as it is being celebrated as this year, “Molly Bloomsday”. The annual commemoration of Joyce was named after Ulysses’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, but this year the focus is on Leopold’s wife, Molly Bloom, with a four-day, all-female arts festival taking place in Ireland as you read this. More on that straight after this week’s highlights.

“The freedom Joyce brought to the Irish tradition has been more useful to female writers than to male,” the novelist Anne Enright wrote in her tribute to Ulysses turning 100 in 2022. “His heretical legacy has been welcomed as a gift by writers such as Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello, whilehis innovative genius is more often declared a burden by the men.”

And women are continuing to take inspiration from the great Irish writer: the YES festival, which has been taking place in Derry and north Donegal, has featured more than 30 female artists over the past four days. The festival, named because the word “Yes” opens and closes Ulysses’s final Episode 18, with 90 other yeses in between, is the culmination of the Ulysses European Odyssey, a project that has been running since 2022 across Europe, producing artistic responses to Ulysses in public spaces. The recasting of Bloomsday as Molly Bloomsday is “a reflection of the richness of James Joyce’s work and how it can be reinterpreted and given new life”, Martina Devlin, writer and programme curator of the festival, says. “There is so much in there that you can’t just boil it all down to Leopold Bloom.”

As part of the Molly Bloomsday celebrations, the festival with feature the premiere of The Molly Films, in which actors including Harriet Walter, Adjoa Andoh and Siobhán McSweeney perform one of the eight long sentences from the ending of Ulysses, known as Molly’s Soliloquy. The films (which will be available to stream for eight days from tomorrow – Monday – at yesderry.com) are “a brilliant example of how Joyce’s words become something else when they are performed”, Devlin says, and she hopes they will offer a new perspective on the novel, or a way in for those who have been daunted by it in the past.

The character of Molly Bloom is “inspirational as a frank, funny, fully realised woman”, Devlin adds, and “proof that women are far from the weaker sex in Joyce’s eyes. He chose to end his magnum opus, Ulysses, with a dazzling monologue in Molly’s voice – in the process, he immortalised this compelling, earthy, credible representation of a woman who was lover, wife, mother and creative being.”

Isabella Hammad’s Women’s prize shortlisted novel Enter Ghost is spectacular. It’s such an effective way into a place so many people have never been and need to understand better. And there’s a nonfiction book called Multidirectional Memory by Michael Rothberg that has had an impact on me in terms of understanding the way different genocidal histories need to better speak to each other. I’m excited to read VV’s book, Brotherless Night, next. That’s going to be top of my list. Naomi Klein

The History of a Difficult Child by my friend Mihret Sibhat is an astonishing, beautiful novel set in Ethiopia. The narrative voice is so powerful and it’s very funny and full of political wit. Mihret graduated from an MFA programme that I teach at the University of Minnesota, so I was able to read it in manuscript when I was writing Brotherless Night. My book has its moments of humour but it’s not really it’s predominant thing, so I was grateful to have something funny to read during that writing period. It was just a treat. I also loved The Boat People by Sharon Bala, which, like my book, is set in Sri Lankan communities. It’s about people seeking to migrate, which is so timely right now. VV Ganeshananthan