Awards

Farmgate Café National Poetry Award

The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award was established in 2019 with sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, The Farmgate Café. This award is €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English published in 2025 by a poet residing in Ireland. Judges this year were were Ailbhe Darcy, Maya C. Popa and Thomas Dillon Redshaw.

Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winning poet will receive their prize and present a short reading on 12th May. A shortlist will be announced in April .

Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition

The prize reading will take place on Saturday 18th May. The winning chapbooks of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Playing Paradise by Katie Hale and We Fall, We Carry by Róisín Leggett Bohan, will be unveiled with readings.

Fool for Poetry Competition Joint Winner

The winning chapbooks of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Playing Paradise by Katie Hale and We Fall, We Carry by Róisín Leggett Bohan, will be unveiled with readings.

Fool for Poetry Competition Joint Winner
Katie Hale is a novelist and poet, based in Cumbria. She won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of two novels: The Edge of Solitude and My Name is Monster. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Northern Writers’ Award, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. She has held Writer in Residence positions in numerous countries, including Australia, the US and Svalbard. Katie also mentors young writers through Writing Squad.

Fool for Poetry Competition Joint Winner:
Róisín Leggett Bohan is a writer from Cork. In 2025, she was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and was longlisted for the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition. Her work features in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Manchester Review, Dedalus Press, and was showcased on RTÉ Radio 1. She is the co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing, holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC, and is a grateful recipient of an Arts Council Literature Bursary and Cork City Council Artist Bursaries.

The Munster Literature Centre established the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition in 2005. It was established as an annual prize in 2015. The competition offers writers the opportunity to have their poems published in a high-quality production from the Munster Literature Centre's publishing branch, Southword Editions. The winners receive cash prizes as well as a reading and three nights' accommodation at the festival. You can see previous winners and buy their chapbooks at the bottom the page here.

Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition

Gregory O'Donoghue Competition 1st Prize
Anthony Lawrence has published nineteen collections of poems and a novel. His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the Ginkgo prize for Eco poetry and the New South Wales Premiers Award. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.

Anthony will receive €2,000 and read from a selection of his poems on Saturday 18th May. His winning poem, ‘Seeing Red’, will be published in issue 50 of Southword.

The Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition is an annual poetry competition for a single poem, named in honour of a late Irish poet long associated with the Munster Literature Centre. It's open to original, unpublished poems in the English language ofless than 40 lines on any subject, in any style, by a writer of any nationality, living anywhere in the world. Submissions are accepted from August to November annually. As well as a first prize of €2,000, and publication in the literary journal Southword, if the winner comes to Cork to collect their prize, we lavish them with hotel accommodation, meals, drinks and VIP access to the literary stars at the Cork International Poetry Festival.