Saturday, May 20th

Fool for Poetry & Gregory O’Donoghue Prize Readings

3.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5– book here

At this event the winning chapbooks of the most recent Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, War Food by Milica Mijatović and What it Costs by Tracy Gaughan, will be launched with readings by the poets. Both poets will receive a cash prize and 25 copies of their books.

Milica Mijatović is a Serb poet and translator. Born in Brčko, Bosnia and Hercegovina, she relocated to the United States where she earned a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Capital University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, Plume, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Collateral, Santa Clara Review, Barely South Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Consequence.

Tracy Gaughan lives in Galway. Her poetry has appeared in Southword, Crannóg and ROPES. She was a finalist in the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and was selected for the Irish Writer Centre’s Mentorship Program in 2022. That same year, her poem The Wild Purge was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. A former poetry editor at The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, Tracy holds an MA in International Literatures from the University of Galway and is the recipient of two Arts Council Awards. Her collective anthology, Pushed Toward the Blue Hour, is published with Nine Pens Press.

 

Jenny Mitchell won the Poetry Book Awards in 2021 for her 2nd collection, Map of a Plantation, which is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University. The best-selling debut collection, Her Lost Language, is One of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales), and her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, is a Poetry Kit Book of the Month. She has won several competitions and is widely-published.

As winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, Jenny Mitchell will receive her €2,000 prize and have the opportunity to read her winning poem When Our Mother Dies as well as a selection of her other work. Her winning poem, along with other prizewinners and runners up,  will be published in issue 44 of Southword.

(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 in 2021.

Aneas Showcase

4.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5– book here

Iris nua bhliantúil atá tiomnaithe go hiomlán don gcuid is fearr de litríocht chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge í Aneas, iris a léiríonn go bhfuil neart, ealaín, pléasúr agus tathag fós ag baint le litríocht na teanga sinseartha sa tír seo. Laistigh dá clúdach geobhair filíocht, gearrscéalta agus léirmheasanna doimhne ó na scríbhneoirí is fearr atá ag saothrú na Gaeilge inniu, idir óg is aosta. Is é an mana eagarthóireachta a leagadh amach don iris, thar aon rud eile, ná caighdeán ard scríbhneoireachta.

Tá ceithre chnuasach filíochta foilsithe go dtí seo ag Simon Ó Faoláin, an ceann is déanaí Iasachtaigh (Coiscéim, 2022), anuas ar dhá leabhar d’aistriúcháin liteartha. I measc na ngradam atá buaite ag a chuid scríbhneoireachta tá Duais Glen Dimplex, Duais Strong, Duais Bhaitéar Uí Mhaicín, Duais Cholmcille agus Duais Fhoras na Gaeilge. Tá sé ina stiúrthóir ar An Fhéile Bheag Filíochta, féile dhátheangach filíochta in Iarthar Duibhneach, agus ina eagarthóir ar an iris liteartha Gaeilge Aneas.

File agus aistritheoir é Paddy Bushe a bhíonn ag obair as Gaeilge agus as Béarla. Is ball de Aosdána é.

Is iad Obair Bhaile (2021) agus Grá fiar/Crooked love (2022) an dá chnuasach is déanaí atá foilsithe ag Louis de Paor.

Bhuaigh an cnuasach filíochta is déanaí ó Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin, Agallamh sa Cheo - Cnoc Bhréanainn, Gradam Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide 2021.

Tá dhá chnuasach gearrscéalta foilsithe ag Colm Ó Ceallacháin. Tá cónaí air i gCorcaigh.

Is file, scríbhneoir, agus teagascóir Gaeilge é an Conallach Dubhán Ó Longáin.

Is as Gaeltacht na Rinne i gContae Phort Láirge í Áine Uí Fhoghlú agus d’fhoilsigh sí a ceathrú cnuasach filíochta, Mná dár Mhair i 2022.

Is file agus údar do pháistí í Eibhlís Carcione. Tá trí chnuasach filíochta foilsithe aici Tonn Chlíodhna (2015) Eala Oíche (2019) agus Bean Róin (2023).

File í Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh as Trá Lí i gCo. Chiarraí. Tá trí bhunchnuasaigh foilsithe aici i nGaeilge ó 2008.

Buy issues of Aneas from Southword Editions.

Polina Barskova (Russia / USA) & Valzhyna Mort (Belarus / USA)

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5– book here

Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet born in Petersburg (Russia), author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is now available in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press) and Air Raid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). She lives and teaches in Berkeley, CA.

Buy Air Raid from Ugly Duckling Presse.

“Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss.” — Marina Brown

Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, most recently: Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for her translation work. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort writes in English and Belarusian.

Visit the poet's website.

“The voice of Valzhyna Mort is a miraculous reminder that words can do many things—they can dance, can bask in irony, can praise love but they can also tell the truth … They elevate the miserable, the barbarian, the numb to the level of universal idiom of wisdom and grace.” — Adam Zagajewski

(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 in 2021.

Tom French (Ireland) & Suji Kwock Kim (USA / UK)

8.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5– book here

Tom French’s collections are published by The Gallery Press and have received the Forward Prize for Best Collection (2002), the Dermot Healy Award (2015) and the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry (2016). His most recent book Company (Gallery Press, 2022) was an Irish Times Book of the Year in 2022. He lives in coastal County Meath and earns his living in the County Library Service.

Buy Company from Gallery Press.

“The poems in Tom French’s Company, while wide-ranging in subject and mood, are drawn together in their common theme of human connection.” — Irish Times

Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Whiting Writers’ Award, Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize; Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and Notes from the North, which received the International Book & Pamphlet Award (UK). Selections from Disorient, her forthcoming collection, have received the O’Donoghue Prize, as well as awards from Poetry London, the Well Review, and Poetry Society of America. She is 2023 Writer-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust.

Buy Notes from the North from Smith|Doorstop and visit the poet's website.

“These poems are part-nightmare, part-history book written in ammonia and blood. I couldn’t forget these lyrics of murder and escape, brutal musicality and prophecy.” — Aimee Nezhukumatathil

(Moderator) Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, County Waterford, in 1954. He worked at Cork City Libraries until 2014 when he withdrew to write full-time. He has published ten collections of poetry including The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Last Geraldine Officer (2009), Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019) as well as two novels and two books of non-fiction. His prose-book, Poetry, Memory and the Party, was published by Gallery Press in 2021.

Poetry in a Time of War – What Use Is Poetry?

10.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | Tickets €5– book here

What is war poetry and who has a right to write it? Can non-combatants and those not directly witnessing write poetry about war? Is poetry essential or a frippery in time of war? Join a roundtable discussion chaired by poet and festival director Patrick Cotter with poets Carolyn Forché, Suji Kwock Kim and Milica Mijatović.

Carolyn Forché’s most recent collection, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.”

Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Selections from Disorient received the O’Donoghue Prize, as well as awards from Poetry London, the Well Review, and Poetry Society of America.

Milica Mijatović is a Serb poet and translator. Born in Brčko, Bosnia and Hercegovina, she relocated to the United States where she earned a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Capital University. She is the winner of this year's Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition.

(Moderator) Patrick Cotter is an Irish poet, born in Cork City where he still lives. He is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Sonic White Poise, his third full-length collection, was published by Dedalus in 2021.

Image credits: Jenny Mitchell photographed by Billy Grant, Valzhyna Mort photographed by Tanya Kapitonova