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 2024 by a poet residing in Ireland. Judges this year were were Dean Browne, Mary O’Donnell and Maurice Riordan.

Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winning poet, Victoria Kennefick, will receive her prize and present a short reading on May 13th.

Farmgate Café National Poetry Award winner

Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick (Carcanet Press)

Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. She completed a PhD in English Literature at University College Cork and was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University and Georgia College and State University. Her debut poetry collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024, BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March as well as a Book of the Year in The Telegraph, The Sunday Independent and The Poetry Society UK.

In a year where a debut collection does not win the overall Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, the highest scoring debut collection in the competition is awarded the separate Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award. This award is for €1000. This year there is a tie between — and — who will share the prize.

Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award co-winners

In Spring We Turned to Water by Michael Dooley (Doire Press)

Michael Dooley’s poems have appeared in Banshee, the Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. His debut collection, In Spring We Turned to Water, is published by Doire Press.

 

 

High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett (Banshee Press)

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press), was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. They are the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they are currently pursuing a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, where they are an Early Career Research Fellow at the Long Room Hub. 

Shortlisted

What Remains the Same by Alvy Carragher (The Gallery Press)

Alvy Carragher grew up by the River Shannon in Galway and Tipperary and has since lived in Louisiana, Dublin, South Korea, and Canada. She is currently based in Dublin. Her previous collections, Falling in love with broken things (2016) and The men I keep under my bed (2021), were published by Salmon Poetry. What Remains the Same was published by The Gallery Press in 2024. She is a recipient of an Arts Council Literary Bursary and has an MA in Writing from the University of Galway.

The Following Year by Patrick Chapman (Salmon Poetry)

Patrick Chapman was born in Co. Roscommon in 1968. He has published fifteen books since 1991, including ten poetry collections. His latest, The Following Year, appeared from Salmon in 2024. Also a scriptwriter, he has written radio dramas for Doctor Who (Big Finish) and Dan Dare (B7, BBC Radio 4 Xtra), an award-winning short film, and much animated television. His monograph on Robert Forster’s album Danger in the Past is forthcoming in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series. 

The Shark Nursery by Mary O’Malley (Carcanet Press)

Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She is a member of Aosdána and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer’s Fellowship and the 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award for Playing the Octopus (2016). She was the Trinity Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for 2019.

Harmony (Unfinished) by Grace Wilentz (The Gallery Press)

Grace Wilentz is the author of The Limit of Light, which was published by The Gallery Press in October 2020 and went on to be named a book of the year in The Irish Independent and The Irish Times. She has received support from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon including a Literature Bursary and a Next Generation Award. She is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Notre Dame in Dublin. Her most recent collection, Harmony (Unfinished), was published by The Gallery Press in October 2024.

Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition

The prize reading will take place on Saturday May 17th.The winning chapbooks of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Superposition by Lauren O'Donovan and Drought / Diagnosis by Liza Katz Duncan, will be unveiled with readings.

Fool for Poetry Competition 1st Prize Superposition by Lauren O'Donovan

Lauren O’Donovan has won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and the Southword Subscriber’s Poetry Prize. She is fortunate to have her work sometimes published in journals and anthologies, most recently in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, and Southword. Lauren is co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing and Lime Square Poets, and a grateful recipient of Cork County Council Arts and Arts Council funding. She is an Irish writer, graduate of UCC, and lives in Cork with her family.

Fool for Poetry Competition 2nd Prize: Drought / Diagnosis by Liza Katz Duncan

Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Common, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A 2024-25 Climate Resiliency Fellow, she lives in New Jersey (Lenni-Lenape), USA, where she teaches multilingual learners.

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

The prize reading will take place on Saturday May 17th. The winning poem of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, ‘Dancing with Thierry Thieu Niang’ by Lani O'Hanlon will be read along with a selection of other poems.

Lani O'Hanlon is a dance artist, somatic movement therapist and writer living in a renovated cottage beside the sea in County Waterford. Her poetry collection Landscape of the Body was published in 2023 by the Dedalus Press. Her poetry is widely published and broadcast on RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany. She was the winner of the Poetry Ireland Trocaire Award in 2022 and other prizes include The Bridport Prize, Poetry on the Lake and the Hennessey New Irish Writing.

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.