Setanta Sports has made a welcome revival of the irish Sports Book of the Year Award. They have made a four year commitment and assembled a strong judging panel of leading writers and commentators from across the Irish media.
These include Malachy Logan, Tony Leen, Adrian Russell, Robbie Whelan and Adrian Barry.
The Award is also being supported by Publishing Ireland and will carry a prize fund made up of €1,500 in cash, a trophy and €10,000 worth of advertising on Setanta Sports. A long list will be drawn up in October and the winner will be announced in December.
Setanta will also produce a special show featuring all those on the short list, providing great coverage for a genre that has proved a consistent winner among Irish readers, perhaps more so than than the consistency of the quality.
That said there have been some really wonderful books down the years. The Club by Christy O’Connor (The GAA variant, despite the potential confusion over name and title), Back from the Brink by Paul McGrath and Vincent Hogan and Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage are three personal favourites.
We very much look forward to seeing what emerges from 2015. The Award is open to all books written by an irish writer on the subject of sport, or covering Irish sport since January 2015.
We also cannot let the story pass without commenting on the photograph above which was used to launch the award yesterday and was taken by Cathal Noonan of Inpho.ie.
It’s the little details that make the difference. The setting sets it apart on sports pages that will generally be filled by action shots while the special created cover on the book displayed on the table hits the mark for branding in a subtle way.
The colour coding of the sports equipment and the football in the foreground echo Setanta’s corporate identification and the whole thing works well as a brand awareness piece at a time when the station is showing the European Olympics and getting ready for the arrival of partner BT Sport for the UEFA Champions’ League.
Setanta Sports is one of a strong number of media companies that are full members of the Sport for Business Community. What can we do for your organisation?
