Saturday, 16 May

No booking needed for library events. No physical tickets will be issued for theatre events; your name will be checked off a list at the door. Bookstall sales will be by card only (we cannot accept cash).

Access to all festival events:

Fool for Poetry & Gregory O’Donoghue Prize Readings

3.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

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.

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.

The winning poem of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, ‘Seeing Red’ by Anthony Lawrence will be read by a local actor. It will also be published in issue 50 of Southword.

Isabelle Baafi (UK) & Dean Browne (Ireland) 

4.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignition press, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

Buy Chaotic Good from Faber & Faber and visit the poet's website.

“Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that – with each turn of the chamber – brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.” — Will Harris

Dean Browne is an award-winning poet from Co. Tipperary, Ireland. His debut collection After Party is published by Picador and is a Poetry Society Recommendation. Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021, and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, won the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it is published by Smith|Doorstop (2022). His poems are widely published internationally, in outlets such as New York Review of Books, Columbia Review, London Magazine, Poetry Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, PN Review, Poetry Magazine (Chicago).

Buy After Party from Pan Macmillan.

“Dean Browne is a terrific poet: his language is agile and fresh, his ideas surprising, and the reader feels invigorated, renewed – and lucky to have met such poems.” — Nick Laird

(Moderator) Patrick Cotter was 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. Quality Control at the Miracle Factory, his fourth full-length collection, was published by Dedalus Press in 2025.

Kevin Graham (Ireland) & Bruce Snider (USA)

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Kevin Graham lives with his family in Dublin. His first collection, The Lookout Post, was published by The Gallery Press in 2023. It was shortlisted for the John Pollard Prize and won the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award. In 2025 he won The London Magazine Poetry Prize. A second collection, Time’s Guest, was published in 2025 and his third, Daylight Mystery, will be out in 2026.

Buy Time's Guest from The Gallery Press.

“For years now Kevin Graham’s formal skill and emotional power have marked him out as a rare poetic talent.” — Ciarán O’Rourke

Bruce Snider is the author of four poetry collections, Blood Harmony (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025); Fruit (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have been published widely in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, and POETRY, among others. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Preorder Blood Harmony through the poet's website.

“There is a mythic precision in Blood Harmony, a collection of the limits of recovery and language (‘There was always need in the needle’); heartbreaking elegy; and always Indiana, a place of ice and kerosene but also ‘unmown grass, sweetness, rain.’ No American poet is as empathetic as Bruce Snider.” — Randall Mann

(Moderator) David McLoghlin’s third poetry collection Crash Centre was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. Also in 2025 he was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary for memoir and won the Waterford Poetry Prize. He received a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2023.

Leo Boix (Argentina/UK) & Henri Cole (USA)

8.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and named book of the year by The Guardian and The Week. His debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix is editor and lead translator of Hemisferio Cuir, introducing English readers to major Latin American voices. His work appears in POETRY, The Poetry Review, and international anthologies. He co-directs Un Nuevo Sol, nurturing Latinx writers in the UK.

Buy Southernmost: Sonnets from Chatto & Windus and visit the poet's website.

“Their diasporic intellect summons "Latin America's heart" with equal parts rigour and play in a poetics as sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us.” — Urayoán Noel

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian and Arabic. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir.

Buy The Other Love from Pan Macmillan and visit the poet's website.

“These are hopeful and gilded poems, managing to suggest the rich life of the mind but never abandoning the body … [The Other Love] reveals a new edge to Cole’s voice—composed, taut with nerves, but tempered with wisdom.” — Publisher's Weekly

(Moderator) Billy Ramsell's third poetry collection Render is forthcoming from Banshee Press. His first two poetry collections are Complicated Pleasures (Dedalus Press, 2007) and The Architect's Dream of Winter (Dedalus Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and recently appeared in Italian translation. His recent work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry London, The Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Kim Moore (UK) & Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Ireland)

10.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Kim Moore’s forthcoming collection The House of Broken Things will be published by Corsair in May 2026. Her second collection All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She also writes non-fiction, publishing What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith|Doorstop, 2022) and Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism (Seren, 2023). She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Deputy Programme Leader of the MA and MFA in Creative Writing.

Buy The House of Broken Things from Hachette and visit the poet's website.

“These are terrifically assured poems ‒ sensual, perceptive, entertaining ‒ which bridge the gap between feeling and utterance with a genuine lyric gift.” — Carol Ann Duffy

Annemarie Ní Churreáin comes from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her third poetry collection, Hymn to All the Restless Girls, published by The Gallery Press (2025), appears in The Irish Times Best Poetry of 2025 and among the RTÉ Culture Best Irish Books of the Year. She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award, the Markievicz Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship. Ní Churreáin is a recent Writer in Residence at The Hawthornden Foundation, New York. She is the poetry editor at The Stinging Fly.

Buy Hymn to All the Restless Girls from The Gallery Press and visit the poet's website.

“This collection is not a hymn book ‘for’ these restless girls: it is addressed to them: they are ones being sung to; they are the ones being acknowledged, celebrated, and reclaimed here.” — Aoife Lyall

(Moderator) Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford and educated at UCC. His many collections of poetry include Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019). A former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review, he is a member of Aosdána. His diaries, Poetry, Memory and the Party, were published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. His latest collection is Plenitude (Carcanet Press, 2025).

Image credits: Katie Hale photographed by Phil Rigby, Leo Boix photographed by Naomi Woodis, Henri Cole photographed by Star Black, Annemarie Ní Churreáin photographed by Barry McCall