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Welcome to the Munster
Literature Centre
Founded in 1993, the Munster Literature Centre (Ionad Litríochta an Deiscirt) is a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to the promotion and celebration of literature, especially that of Munster. To this end, we organise festivals, workshops, readings and competitions. Our publishing section, Southword Editions, publishes a biannual journal, poetry collections and short stories. We actively seek to support new and emerging writers and are assisted in our efforts through funding from Cork City Council, Cork County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland.Originally located in Sullivan's Quay, the centre moved to its current premises in the Frank O'Connor House (the author's birthplace) at 84 Douglas Street, in 2003.
In 2000, the Munster Literature Centre organised the first Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival, an event dedicated to the celebration of the short story and named for one of Cork's most beloved authors. The festival showcases readings, literary forums and workshops. Following continued growth and additional funding, the Cork City - Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award was introduced in 2005, coinciding with Cork's designation as that year's European Capital of Culture. The award is now recognised as the single biggest prize for a short story collection in the world and is presented at the end of the festival.In 2002, the Munster Literature Centre introduced the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, an annual short story competition dedicated to one of Ireland's most accomplished story writers and theorists. This too is presented during the FOC festival. The centre also hosts the Cork Spring Literary Festival each year, at which the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize is awarded (established 2010).
Workshops are held by featured authors in both autumn and spring, allowing the general public to receive creative guidance in an intimate setting for a minimal fee. In addition, the centre sponsors a Writer in Residence each year. We invite you to browse our website for further information regarding our events, Munster literature, and other literary information. Should you have any queries, we would be happy to hear from you.
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Literature Centre
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LATEST NEWS
Announcing
The Cork International Short Story Festival 2017!
Wednesday, September 13 - Saturday, September 16
More info soon!
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Now open for submissions!
The Fool for Poetry
International Chapbook Competition 2017
Closing date for submissions is June 30, 2017
1st Prize: €1,000; 2nd Prize :€500
+chapbook publication with 50 free copies
Winning poets offered a reading and three nights' accommodation
at Cork 2018 International Poetry Festival (www.corkpoetryfest.net)
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THE SEÁN Ó FAOLÁIN SHORT
STORY COMPETITION 2017
Now accepting submissions
until July 31, 2017
  
First Prize: €2,000
(approx $2308/£1583 in May 2016), publication in the literary journal Southword,
AND a week-long residency at Anam Cara Writer's and Artist's Retreat
Second Prize: €500 and publication in Southword
Four more shortlisted entries will be selected for publication
in Southword and receive a publication fee of €120
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Read them all here in a special issue of Southword Literary Journal!
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The latest titles in Southword Editions' New Irish Voices chapbook series
First Cut by John Fitzgerald
and
Sound Effects in a Studio by Aidan Mathews
Available here from our online bookstore!
ANNOUNCING
the 2017 Frank O'Connor
International Short Story Fellow
Marie-Helene Bertino
The Munster Literature Centre is pleased to announce that Marie-Helene Bertino has been selected as the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow. Bertino will take up residency in Cork City for three months from September. She will present a reading and a four day masterclass workshop at the Cork International Short Story Festival, will mentor two, emerging, Cork-based writers, teach at the Creative Writing Department in University College Cork and get involved in the literary milieu of the city. The fellowship is an initiative of the Munster Literature Centre and is funded by Cork City Council.
Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut novel 2 A.M. AT THE CAT'S PAJAMAS was a Barnes & Noble Fall ’14 Discover Great New Writers pick and a Best Book of 2014 from NPR, Buzzfeed, and many others. It is currently available in the UK, Turkey, Sweden, France, and Brazil. Her collection of short stories SAFE AS HOUSES was the recipient of The Iowa Short Fiction Award (judged by Jim Shepard), named an Outstanding Collection by The Story Prize and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize.
Awards include the O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize and two Pushcart special mentions, Mississippi Review's Story Prize, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, and NYC’s The Center for Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gigantic, Gunzo (Japan), Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, and many others. She has been featured on Symphony Space NYC’s “Selected Shorts” radio program and lives in Brooklyn, where she was the Associate Editor for One Story for six years and is currently Editor-at-Large at Catapult.
She teaches at NYU and is a faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM.
For more information, please visit: www.mariehelenebertino.com.
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Now available!
Prizewinning chapbooks by John Mee
& Maya Catherine Popa
winners of the Fool for Poetry Competition 2016
Purchase here
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Now available at our online bookstore:
Liberty Walks Naked
a new collection by acclaimed Syrian poet
Maram al-Masri
Purchase here from our online bookstore
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Announcing the prizewinners & shortlist
for the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2017
We received over an astonishing 2,200 entries for the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2017, and it is our pleasure to announce this year's prizewinners and shortlist.
Many thanks are due to our wonderful judge Mary Noonan who read each and every entry, and to all who submitted. And congratulations to these superb poets!
All the winning and shortlisted poems will be published in an upcoming issue of Southword.
First Prize
'Late Song' by Mark Wagenaar
Second Prize
'Tara's Thong' by Alan Garvey
Third Prize
'I Have Never Slept with an Animal' by Suzanne Cleary
Shortlist
'Hope Cove' by Polly Atkin
'An Fear Mór' by Anne Marie Connolly
'Miss Fogarty' by C. L. Dallat
'Next Stop, Ealing Broadway' by Gráinne Daly
'When Almonds Appear in Dreams'by Joanne Dominque Dwyer
'My Father Crashes a Car, 1965' by Jonathan Edwards
'Improvisation in a New Year' by Gary Keenan
'How I Started to Use a Cane' by Owen Lewis
'Ordering Quail as a Friend Lay Dying' by Karla K. Morton
'The Linguists' by Christopher North
'A Dream of Death Before a Burial' by Auesta Safi
'Of Floods. Of How' by Beth Somerford
'Hunt' by Katrina Turner
'Portrait of a Laryngologist' by Mark Wagenaar
'Prince Charming After Bankruptcy and Divorce' by Jeff Walt
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The Munster Literature Centre regrets the passing of John Montague on December 10th.
John was a crucial literary figure, locally, nationally and internationally; one of Ireland's most major and best-loved poets.We had planned for John to take the honour of closing out the 2017 Cork International Poetry Festival in two months' time, on the occasion of the publication of his latest collection Second Childhood. The event will now consist of readings from the book by his daughters Oonagh and Sibyl, and by a selection of his former students including Thomas McCarthy, who has paid fitting tribute to John in this Irish Times Article.
The Irish Examiner marks his passing here.
www.corkpoetryfest.net
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NEW!
We're delighted to announce our line-up for
the Cork International Poetry Festival 2017
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Introducing NEW IRISH VOICES
A new chapbook series by Southword Editions
 Rapture by Roisin Kelly and Bourdon by Paul McMahon mark the exciting beginnings of what are sure to be long and and remarkable careers for these Irish poets.
We're delighted to publish their first chapbooks, both of which can be purchased here at our online bookstore.
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New: Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin on Poetry International
We're delighted to announce the publication of five poems by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin over on Poetry International.
The poems are in Irish and in English translation, and many thanks to Doireann Ní Ghríofa for her introduction to 'one of the most innovative & interesting voices in contemporary Irish language poetry'.
You can read the poems, and more about the poet, here.
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Announcing the 2016 winning, shortlisted
and longlisted stories in the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition:
1st Prize
“The Idyllic Land of the 6’s” by Shauna Mackay (Northumberland, UK)
Shauna Mackay lives in Northumberland with her husband and family. She is a previous recipient of the Andrea Badenoch Award for fiction and has stories published, or forthcoming, at several places online.
View all winning, shortlisted and longlisted authors on the competition page.
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Fool For Poetry Chapbook Winners
   
Congratulations to winners John Mee & Maya Catherine Popa!
PLUS
Two further chapbooks by Róisín Kelly & Paul McMahon
to be published in our 'New Irish Voices' series
There was a 25% increase in entries to this year's Fool for Poetry competition and the standard was extremely high. We will be posting a list of the 12 shortlistees and the many highly commended on munserlit.ie next week. But we can announce now that the overall winner this year was John Mee from Cork who won the Patrick Kavanagh Award just last year. Runner-up was New York-based Maya Catherine Popa - a previous winner of the Gregory O'Donoghue Prize.
Both John and Maya are debutantes and we are very proud to be issuing their first solo publications at the launch of the Cork International Poetry Festival next February. Our chapbook list will be augmented by a 'New Irish Voices' series. In November we will publish debutant chapbooks by Belfast-born, Munster-resident poets Roisin Kelly and Paul McMahon.
Thank you to everyone who entered and to James Harpur, Thomas McCarthy, Leanne O'Sullivan and Matthew Sweeney who judged the final 12 manuscripts shortlisted by Patrick Cotter - anonymous all the way.
View the highly commended and shortlisted titles at our Fool For Poetry page.
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The Munster Literature Centre is a not-for-profit organisation; all moneys raised from the competition benefits writers and writing.
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Previous articles and information available on the Archives page.
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