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I have managed to find a few tidbits for you all.

Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain dies at 68

Nuala O'Faolain, the Irish journalist and author of the frank memoir Are You Somebody, has died. She was 68.

O'Faolin revealed on Ireland's public broadcaster just weeks ago that she had cancer. She was initially diagnosed with lung cancer, but it spread to her brain and liver.

She died Friday morning at a hospice in Dublin, her family said.

Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman earned O'Faolain "entry into an exclusive club: the official (and mostly male) chroniclers of Irish pain and rebirth, from James Joyce to Frank McCourt," The New York Times said of her memoir.

In the book, O'Faolin chronicles her upbringing, one of nine children born to an alcoholic mother and philandering father, himself a newspaper columnist.

Are You Somebody was considered both unusually frank and scandalous, because it told of her own struggles with alcohol and revealed her long lesbian affair with Northern Irish civil rights activist Nell McCafferty.

Lessing calls Nobel Prize a 'bloody disaster'

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing says all the attention she has received since winning the prestigious award could mean she'll never write another full-length novel.

The award has been a "bloody disaster" for her as a writer, she told the BBC.

In an interview with BBC Radio, Lessing, 88, said she has been hounded by the media since capturing the prestigious prize last October and that has made writing a novel almost impossible.

"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed," she told the program Front Row. "I don't have any energy anymore."

The author now says she might give up on writing novels altogether. Her latest book is a partly fictional memoir, Alfred and Emily.

"This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever. Use it while you've got it because it'll go. It's sliding away like water down a plughole."

The poet inspired by her disease

As a magistrate and a deputy head teacher, Glenda Vibert has faced many tough challenges throughout her life.

But the toughest came when three years into retirement when she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The progressive degenerative and incurable neurological disease for which affects her mobility and balance.

However it has not stopped her being creative and Mrs Vibert, from Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, and her husband have launched their poetry anthology, Oops!

The collection features humorous, philosophical and poignant takes on her condition and Mrs Vibert said she had plenty more to come with at least three volumes of poems and short stories filed away.

Elaine Dundy, Author of ‘The Dud Avocado,’ Is Dead at 86

Elaine Dundy, the author of the best-selling novel “The Dud Avocado,” whose title came from the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, her husband at the time, died on May 1 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, said her daughter, Tracy Tynan.

“The Dud Avocado,” published in 1958, chronicled the Parisian adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, a free-spirited American girl with the avocadolike qualities typical of the breed: “So green — so eternally green,” one of her European admirers gushes. A precise contemporary of Holly Golightly, Sally Jay carried on the Daisy Miller tradition of ardent, questing American women exemplified more recently by the characters Isadora Wing and Carrie Bradshaw.

“It seemed to me that the American girl had changed tremendously from the Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway days, and that this change had not yet been recorded, at least to my satisfaction,” Ms. Dundy once said. She later complained that critics failed to credit her heroine’s orgasm as an important first step toward the frank treatment of female sexuality in fiction.