Friday, May 17th

Only €70 when you book tickets to all four days of theatre events (22% discount) — €70 Festival Pass here:

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Prebooked Poetry Introductions

2.30pm, Cork City Library | Free

The Prebooked Poetry Introductions involves six individuals who have yet to publish a short chapbook or full-length collection of poems. Each poet, chosen through open submission, will read in a ten-minute reading slot, in many cases availing of their first opportunity to give a reading in a professional setting.

Eoin Cahill is from Cork. His poems have recently appeared in HOWL New Irish Writing, Southword and The Storms Journal. In July 2023 he was a participant in The Stinging Fly Summer School. Find him @eoinspoems.
Paul Dylan (he/they) is a writer from Cork City. His poems have appeared in The Amphibian, Lumpen, and Unapologetic Magazine. Dylan was awarded a mentorship bursary by the Munster Literature Centre in 2023.
Patrick Holloway is a writer of fiction and poetry. He won the Bath Short Story Prize in 2023 and the Paul McVeigh Residency. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Moth, The London Magazine, among others.
Róisín Leggett Bohan is a writer from Cork. Her work appears in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Aesthetica, Magma, New Irish Writing, Southword, Amsterdam Quarterly and more. Róisín is the grateful recipient of Arts Council funding, Cork City Arts funding, and a Munster Literature Mentorship. She is a Poetry Ireland Introductions poet, a UCC graduate and editor of HOWL New Irish Writing.
Lauren O’Donovan is a writer from Cork, Ireland. In 2023, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Cúirt New Writing Prize in Poetry. She is fortunate to have her work published often in journals and anthologies. Lauren is a graduate of UCC, co-founder of Lime Square Poets, and an editor at HOWL New Irish Writing.
Niamh Twomey is a poet from Co. Clare. She won the 2023 Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition and the 2022 Trim Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The London Review, Rattle, Local Wonders, Banshee and Southword. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC and is currently pursuing a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast.

Mererid Hopwood (UK) & Mikael Vogel (Germany)

4.00pm, Cork City Library | Free

Mererid Hopwood is Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth and Secretary of Academi Heddwch Cymru (Wales’ Peace Institute). She won the Chair and Crown for poetry and the Prose Medal at the National Eisteddfod. In 2016 her collection of poems Nes Draw won the Welsh Book of the Year Prize in the poetry category, and in 2023 she received the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry. She has been Children’s Laureate for Wales. She takes great pleasure in translating literature and in collaborating with other artists on music, theatre, dance and visual arts projects in Wales and oversees.

Buy Dychmygu Iaith from University of Wales Press and visit the poet's webpage.

“The linguistic awareness that comes from speaking a minority language is brought to the fore in this work and is a celebration of multilingualism.” — Morgan Owen

Mikael Vogel was born in Bad Säckingen, Germany, in 1975. He has been based primarily in Berlin since 2003. Among his six published books of poetry are: ›zum Bleiben, wie zum Wandern – Hölderlin, theurer Freund‹ (with José F. A. Oliver, Schiler & Mücke, 2020) and ›Dodos auf der Flucht. Requiem für ein verlorenes Bestiarium‹ (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2018). His seventh book of poetry will come out later this year. His numerous awards include Hermann Lenz Writing Grant (2002), a Yakiuta Travel Grant to Hōkkaido, Japan (2015), and the Arbeitsstipendium deutschsprachige Literatur für Berliner Autorinnen und Autoren 2021.

Visit the poet's website.

“The results of his meticulous work on the topic of mass extinction is, in my eyes, nothing less than an epoch-defining work.” — Eric Giebel

(Moderator) Lucy Holme is a PhD student and creative writing teacher living in Cork. Her work features in PN Review, PIR, The Pig’s Back, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The London Magazine, and Southword amongst others. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis (Broken Sleep 2022) was shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award and a collection of non-fiction essays is forthcoming in Autumn 2024. She was a finalist in the recent Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition.

André Naffis-Sahely (UK) & Tom Sleigh (USA)

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He also co-edited Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015) and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis and the editor of Poetry London.

Buy High Desert from Bloodaxe Books and visit the poet's website.

“A globally engaged meditation on history, migration, inclusion, and justice. Drawing on found text from diaries to academic manuscripts and traversing across North America, Europe, and Asia, High Desert is at once humble and unafraid.” — Maggie Wong

Tom Sleigh’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, and other magazines. A Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Buy The King's Touch from Graywolf Press and visit the poet's website.

“Sleigh’s deft hand, attention to detail, and literary experience make him an ideal interlocutor … In The King’s Touch, Sleigh excels at seeing and interpreting the world as it is, on its own merits.” — Kevin O’Rourke

(Moderator) Patrick Cotter is an Irish poet, born in Cork City where he still lives. His poems have been published in journals such as the Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Poetry and Poetry Review. He is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. His poems have been translated into over a dozen languages and he has given readings of his work across the Northern Hemisphere. Sonic White Poise, his third full-length collection, was published by Dedalus Press in 2021.

Donika Kelly (USA) & Dante Micheaux (USA / UK)

8.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Buy The Renunciations from Graywolf Press.

“Kelly’s poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine.” — Khadijah Queen

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review; Magma; Poem-A-Day; Poetry; Poetry London; PN Review; The Rialto and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s other honors include an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Ambit Magazine Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from The New York Times Foundation. He is a Fellow and Director of Programs at Cave Canem Foundation. Micheaux’s most recent work is the libretto for Rolf Hind’s opera Sky In a Small Cage, which will premiere in London, at the Barbican, this autumn.

Buy Circus from Bloodaxe Books and visit the poet's webpage.

“Dante Micheaux’s superb poetic aptitude is wedded to an equally superb poetic amplitude. Intimate soliloquy, lyric address, and linguistic allegory merge with resonating voices and personae. This poem is masterful, paradoxical and spiritual.” — Terrance Hayes

(Moderator) Kimberly Reyes is the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. and Running to Stand Still. Her work is featured in various outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Time.com, The New York Post, The Village Voice, The Irish Examiner, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, RTÉ Radio, NY1 News, The Best American Poetry blog, poets.org, American Poets Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Southword, and The Stinging Fly.

David Harsent (UK) & Sarah Holland-Batt (Australia)

10.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5

David Harsent ’s has published thirteen collections of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize. Night was triple shortlisted in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of the poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest at the time of the Greek junta, was published in 2023. His latest collection, Skin, appeared in February 2024. Harsent has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent collaborations have been performed at major venues worldwide.

Buy Skin from Faber.

“As these poems flicker and shift, haunted by ‘the spectre of yourself’ … the sense is of time’s inexorable demands, and the vast unhuman forces arrayed against us.” — Ben Wilkinson

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic, and the author of three books of poems—most recently The Jaguar—and a book of essays, Fishing for Lightning, a collection of her columns on contemporary Australian poetry written for The Australian newspaper. Her books have received many of Australia’s major honours for poetry, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Stella Prize, The Australian Book of the Year, and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Award. Her Selected Poems is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in 2024. She presently is Professor of Poetry at the Queensland University of Technology.

Buy The Jaguar from Bloodaxe Books and visit the poet's webpage.

“Unpredictable harmonics, intense wordplay, synesthetic sensual registries, double analogies, resonant emotional force, and insistent internationality – what is there to say about The Jaguar that doesn’t begin with extraordinary.” — Forrest Gander

(Moderator) Patrick Cotter is an Irish poet, born in Cork City where he still lives. His poems have been published in journals such as the Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Poetry and Poetry Review. He is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. His poems have been translated into over a dozen languages and he has given readings of his work across the Northern Hemisphere. Sonic White Poise, his third full-length collection, was published by Dedalus Press in 2021.

Image credits: Tom Sleigh photographed by Annette Hornischer, Donika Kelly photographed by Ladan Osman, Sarah Holland-Batt photographed by John Feder