Tuesday, May 14th

The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award

6.30pm, Farmgate Cafe | Free but ticketed (Eventbrite)

The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award was established in 2019 with sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, The Farmgate Café. The partnership between the Munster Literature Centre and the Farmgate received the Business to Arts 2019 Best Small Sponsorship Award. The award will be €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English (including translations from other languages) published in 2023, by a poet residing in Ireland. As of 2023, 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 will be awarded the separate Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award. This award is for €1000. The three judges for this year are Afric McGlinchey, Patrick Deeley and Molly Twomey.

Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin will receive her prize and present a short reading. The full shortlist and winner of the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award can be found here.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942. She was a founder member of Cyphers, the literary journal (1975). Her first collection, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. The Gallery Press has published her nine collections of poems including The Sun-fish which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and The Mother House (2019) winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-2019 and, in 20225, was elected a Saoi, the highest honour of Aosdána.