Thursday, 14th 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:

Sylva Fischerová (Czech Republic) & Adelaide Ivánova (Brazil/Germany)

2.30pm, Cork City Library | Free

Sylva Fischerová, named the first City Poet of Prague in 2018, is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes prose, essays and poetry and translates Pindar; her latest collection of poems Jiný život. Wittgenstein (The Other Life. Wittgenstein) was published in 2023. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, her poems were set to music by the Czech singer Monika Načeva. In 2024, she became the first Czech woman writer to be awarded the prestigious Karel Čapek Prize by the Czech PEN Club.

Buy The Swing in the Middle of Chaos from Bloodaxe Books.

“Driven by a restless moral intelligence which never loses urgency, Fischerová’s poems mix hope with irony, showing why the world makes us ache.” — Dennis Schmitz

Adelaide Ivánova (1982, Recife) is a journalist and housing justice activist, working in poetry, photography, performance, translation, political education, and publishing. In 2018, she won the Rio de Janeiro Literature Award for her second book of poetry, o martelo, a documentary poetry book based on research on sexualized violence in Brazil. Her most recent book, ASMA, was chosen as the best poetry book of 2024 by 451 magazine and was listed as one of the 20 best books of the year by Folha de São Paulo. In 2025, it won the APCA award for best book of poetry, and it was longlisted for both Oceanos and Jabuti Awards.

Buy o martelo (the hammer) from London Review bookshop and visit the poet's website.

“Ivánova’s poems give us not just a new vocabulary, but a new rhythm, to discuss the places where everyday life can yield to our desires for radical rupture from the structures that bow us.” — Laura Jaramillo

(Moderator) Afric McGlinchey’s first two poetry collections were translated into Italian. Tied to the Wind (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), a hybrid memoir, was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary, translated into Macedonian and broadcast over five nights on RTÉ’s The Book on One. A multi-award-winning poet, Afric’s most recent collection, À la belle étoile – the odyssey of Jeanne Baré (Salmon Poetry), has been nominated for the Forward and Piggott Prizes.

Celia de Fréine (Ireland) & Menna Elfyn (Wales)

4.00pm, Cork City Library | Free

Celia de Fréine writes in many genres in both Irish and English. Awards for her poetry include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Gradam Litríochta Chló Iar-Chonnacht and the British Comparative Literature Association Translation Award. Her plays have won numerous Oireachtas awards and her film and television scripts have won awards in Ireland and America. She has been shortlisted four times in different categories for An Post Irish Book Awards. Aibítir Aoise: Alphabet of an Age (Arlen House, 2025) is her most recent poetry collection.

Buy Aibitir Aoise Alphabet of an Age and visit the poet's website.

“Tá ábhar machnaimh sa chnuasach seo. Briseann sé múnlaí. Osclaíonn sé fuinneoga na samhlaíochta agus baineann de Fréine triail as féidearachtaí nach bhfuil triáilte go dtí seo.” — Mícheál Ó Ruairc

Menna Elfyn is an award-winning poet, playwright who has published sixteen collections of poetry, children’s novels, libretti for UK and US composers, plays for radio and television in Welsh and English. Her bilingual volume Murmur (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. She has been translated into over twenty languages. Her latest collection Parch (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) and also the first ever Arabic/Welsh/English collection Let the World’s People Sing (H’mm Foundation, 2025). A new Welsh language collection Carco (Welsh for caring) will be published in May 2026, a Selected 1976-2026 which marks her fifty years of publishing solely in the Welsh language.

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

“Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as indestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes.” — Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

(Moderator) Clíona Ní Ríordáin is a critic, translator, and O’Donnell Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among her publications are English Language Poets in University College Cork 1970-1980 (Palgrave, 2020). Her translations of Maylis Besserie’s Irish trilogy appeared from Lilliput. A personal anthology of Gerry Murphy's poems, Plus loin encore (co-translator Paul Bensimon) appeared with Circe in 2022. She has also edited four anthologies of Irish poetry.

Cathy Galvin (UK) & Greg Rappleye (USA)

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Cathy Galvin published three pamphlets, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking The Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva (2019), before her first full-length book of poetry, Ethnology: a love song for Connemara (Bloodaxe Books, 2026). She has been nominated for several awards including the Ilkley Poetry Prize, the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize and the Goldsmiths/ Spread the Word Life-Writing Prize, and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, Heinrich Böll (Achill Island) residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. She is founder of the Sunday Times Short Story Award and of the short story organisation, the Word Factory.

Buy Ethnology: a love song for Connemara from Bloodaxe Books.

“Ethnology is a book of wonders, poised on that moment when legends become myth and songs become the wind.” — Richard Skinner

Greg Rappleye's poems have appeared widely in the United States and have been frequently anthologized. In Ireland, his poetry has been published in Fish Anthology 2021, Southword, and elsewhere. His second collection, A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) won the Brittingham Prize. His third book, Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), was a finalist for the Arkansas Prize in Poetry. His fourth collection, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds (Dos Madres Press, 2018), won the Arts & Letters Prize. Barley Child (University of Arkansas Press, 2025), concerns his Irish-American family and won the 2025 Miller Williams Prize.

Buy Barley Child from University of Arkansas Press.

“[A] richly imagined and lyrically presented record of the Irish American experience from the pen of someone who knows, who can reliably summon up both its reality and its spirit.” — Robert Dunsdon

(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.

John F. Deane (Ireland) & Martha Sprackland (UK)

8.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland. He is founder of Poetry Ireland, Ireland’s national poetry society, and its journal The Poetry Ireland Review. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish arts academy. In October of 2023 Carcanet published Selected and New Poems, a generous choice of poems from earlier years, together with a substantial sequence of new work. In 2025 Guillemot Press published the third “bookling”, The Red Gate. A new collection of poems, Jonah and Me, was published from Carcanet in December of 2025 and has become a recommendation of the Poetry Book Society in London.

Buy Jonah and Me from Carcanet.

“John F. Deane’s new collection invites us to pause at the sea’s edge – whether sandy or steep – and look out into an uncontrolled vista of strangeness that is also life-giving. But we are also invited to look with the same patience and intensity into the mystery of memory, individual and familial, and the dark mystery of contemporary violence.” — Rowan Williams

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Citadel (Pavilion, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award; a new collection is forthcoming in 2027. Martha teaches for Arvon, where she is also a Trustee. Martha’s translations from Spanish include poems and stories by Ana Gorría, Gladys Mendía, Verónica Viola Fisher and Sara Mesa, and in 2021 she was shortlisted for the Peirene–Stevns Translation Prize for fiction. Her new translation of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, Dark Night: Poetry and Selected Prose, is published by Penguin Classics (2026).

Buy Dark Night: Poetry and Selected Prose from Penguin and visit the poet's website.

"[A] sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland … Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence.” — Penguin Classics

(Moderator) Patrick Holloway is a prize-winning author of fiction and poetry. His debut novel, The Language of Remembering, was published to critical acclaim. His second novel, Interlude, is forthcoming with Eriu. He has won the Bath Short Story Prize, Flash 500, and the Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize. His work appears in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, The Moth, and Southword. He edits the literary journal The Four Faced Liar.

Christina Hennemann (Germany/Ireland) & Audrey Molloy (Ireland/Australia)

10.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Christina Hennemann is the author of the poetry collection Birthmark (Shearsman, 2025) and three poetry pamphlets. Her awards include the Cerasus Poetry Prize, the Luain Press Poetry Prize, an Agility Award from Arts Council Ireland, a Mayo Artist Bursary, a Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the shared Ireland Freedom to Write Award supported by the John Hewitt Society and Irish PEN. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Magma, Poetry Wales, New Irish Writing, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in Germany and has found her home on the west coast of Ireland.

Buy Birthmark from Shearsman Books and visit the poet's website.

“This remarkable book is charged throughout with pulsing, tactile language; with feral, meaty, intense and intensely sexual poems, in which bodily, linguistic and geographical entities strive towards merging.” — Christodoulos Makris

Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her debut collection The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021) received the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. Her third collection Fallen is published by both The Gallery Press and Pitt Street Poetry. Audrey has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Manchester Metropolitan University. She has been shortlisted for major awards including the Montreal, Peter Porter, Bridport and Moth poetry prizes. She is co-editor of The Marrow International Poetry.

Buy Fallen from The Gallery Press and visit the poet's website.

“This mature and grounded voice, unafraid to expose the fragility and vulnerability that come with life’s experiences, is suffused with human warmth that connects with and engages the reader.” — Ella Jeffery

(Moderator) Róisín Leggett Bohan is a writer from Cork and co-winner of this year’s Fool for Poetry International Poetry Competition. In 2025, she was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. 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.

Image credits: Adelaide Ivánova photographed by Lucas Soares