I’m absolutely thrilled to be a featured poet at the Michael Hartnett Poetry Event at this year’s Listowel Writers Week. The event takes place in the Listowel Arms Hotel at 4pm on Friday 1st June 2018 and tickets can be purchased here. I was last at Writers Week in 2013 when I was reading a short story as part of the New Writers Salon and the craic was mighty.
This year I’m delighted to be featured with Caoilinn Hughes, Mark Roper and John O’Donnell (pictured below). I am great admirer of Michael Hartnett’s work and in particular his Inchicore Haiku was a huge influence on my poetry film haiku sequence Red Line Haiku.
I was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2013 along with Caoilinn whose first collection Gathering Evidence (Carcanet) went on to win the Irish Times Strong/Shine Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Piggott Poetry Prize. Her first novel Orchid and the Wasp (which I’m really looking forward to) is being launched at Writers Week also.
Mark Roper’s latest collection Bindweed was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. A Gather of Shadow was also shortlisted for that award and won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014. With photographer Paddy Dwan, he has published The River Book and The Backstrand. Their book about the Comeragh Mountains will be published in autumn 2018. He has written librettos for two operas composed by Eric Sweeney.
Poet, John O’Donnell, will chair the event. John has published three previous collections of poems, Some Other Country (2002), Icarus Sees His Father Fly (Dedalus Press, 2004) and On Water (Dedalus Press, 2014). Sunlight: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Niall MacMonagle, is published by Dedalus Press in 2018. His awards include the Hennessy Award for Poetry, the Ireland Funds Prize, and the SeaCat National Poetry Prize. As a fiction writer his work has appeared widely in recent years, and in 2013 he received the Hennessy Award for Fiction. A senior counsel, he lives and works in Dublin. He has been a member of the Board of Poetry Ireland, among other institutions, and has served on the Board of The Arts Council.
I plan to see the great Billy Collins later that evening, so all in all it should be a really exciting time. I hope some of you can make it along!
There’s a great free event at Listowel Library at 6pm on Thursday 31st May called Wild Voices, an excellent mix of poetry, story and music, curated by Annemarie Ní Churreáin and featuring the likes of Amanda Bell, James Martyn Joyce, Liz Quirke, Alice Kinsella, Victoria Kennefick and Karen J. Mc Donnell. But there’s so much more going on all week! You can check out the full programme for Writers Week 2018 here.
