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POETRY: December 1st, 2021 ‒ February 28th, 2022
FICTION: January 1st ‒ March 31st, 2022

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Anatomy of a Honey Girl by Liz Houchin

Online Launch at 7.00pm, Thursday 2nd December

Free tickets now available for the launch of our latest poetry chapbook, Anatomy of a Honey girl by Liz Houchin. Book here.

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100 fees-free entries for this year's
O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition

Submittable portal will open at 12pm (noon) IST, November 28th

The places are on offer for individuals who do not have the financial means to pay the entrance fee. The places are offered on a trust basis. If you can afford the fee we implore you not to use this facility as you will be depriving someone who really needs it. Submission portal will open here.

In the meantime, find full information about this opportunity on our competition page here.

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Seán O'Faoláin Short Story Competition Results

The winning and shortlisted short stories will feature in issue 42 of Southword. This year, second prize is shared between two writers. The shortlist, highly commended authors, and judge's statement can be found here.

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Cork International Short Story Festival in October

The 2021 Cork International Short Story Festival is online this year from October 12th to 16th (with the exception of the opening event, the launch of Cónal Creedon’s latest collection at Waterstones in Cork). Tickets are by donation and the full programme is live at corkshortstory.net

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Tina Pisco is this year's Frank O'Connor
International Short Story Fellow

Tina Pisco has been appointed the sixth Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow. Pisco has been a professional writer for thirty years, publishing novels, poetry and short story collections, a collection of newspaper columns, as well as comics, screenplays and internet drama scripts. She has taught creative writing all over Ireland and works as an editor and mentor. Pisco was born in Spain to a multi-cultural, multi-lingual family and moved to West Cork in 1992. Her debut short story collection Sunrise Sunset and other fictions (Fish 2016) was long-listed for the Edge Hill prize. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines, journals and anthologies. In 2020, Pisco was appointed Cork city Libraries first Writer-in-Residence. The Fellowship will allow her to finish her second collection of short stories.  As the Frank O’Connor Fellow, Pisco will also deliver a series of lectures on O’Connor, as well as run workshops on the craft of writing short stories. The fellowship is devised and managed by the Munster Literature Centre and generously funded by Cork City Council.

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Basher Bacon performs new poems
by Cork School Children for Crinniú na nÓg!

Basher Bacon (with help from Frank the dog) visited the Munster Literature Centre to read ten truly remarkable poems by Cork school children age 8 to 12 years old for Crinniú na nÓg, June 12th.

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Cork Poet Laureate: William Wall

A Munster Literature Centre initiative funded by Cork City Council

The Cork Poet Laureateship is an initiative of the Munster Literature Centre, funded by Cork City Council. During a period of historic upheaval the laureateship is conceived as a project where a Cork poet can respond personally to themes and issues of public import affecting Cork City and County. These can be sporting events, current affairs, social issues, historic anniversaries or anything else the laureate believes concerns the people of Cork as a community. The laureateship runs for ten months from May 2021. The laureate will publish a new poem at the end of each month. In 2022 the poems will be collected into a chapbook to be launched during the Cork World Book Festival. William Wall has been appointed as laureate. Read about William Wall and read his first poem here.

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Cork International Poetry Festival 2021

Tickets are now available for the 10th Cork International Poetry Festival! Taking place May 10th to 15th, twenty-nine poets (from emerging talents to individuals with global reputations) will give readings of new work. Full #CorkPoetryFest21 programme here.

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Mentorships in Fiction, Poetry and Memoir

Six writers will mentor these munster writers who applied through open submission

          Mentor: Arnold Fanning

          Mentor: Grace Wells

          Mentor: Afric McGlinchey

          Mentor: Danny Denton

          Mentor: Billy O'Callaghan

          Mentor: Thomas McCarthy

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Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition Results

Losing the Farm by Felicity Sheehy and If All This Never Happened by Vicky Morris will be published in mid-April. The shortlist and commended titles can be found here.

Losing the Farm by Felicity Sheehy
(New York, USA)

Felicity Sheehy's work has appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, Narrative, Poetry Ireland Review, The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Shenandoah, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Jane Martin Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She has received additional prizes and scholarships from Narrative Magazine, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, the York Poetry Prize, and the Ledbury Poetry Festival, among others. In 2019 and 2020, she was listed as one of Narrative's 30 below 30 emerging writers. She received a B.A. from Yale University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge on a Paul Mellon Fellowship.

If All This Never Happened by Vicky Morris
(Sheffield, England)

Vicky Morris is a British/Welsh poet and creative educator based in Sheffield. She’s been widely published in places like The Rialto, Under the Radar and The North and is the editor of four anthologies of poetry and fiction by young writers. In 2020, she won first place in the Aurora Prize for Poetry, and was one of ten shortlisted in the Magma Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Mary Jean Chan. In 2019 she won first place in the Prole Laureate Competition and was highly commended in the Mother’s Milk Poetry Prize. Vicky has worked for many years developing young creatives across South Yorkshire and founded Hive Young Writers Project in 2016. In 2019 she received a Sarah Nulty Award for Creativity for her impact in the region. She is a recent Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and a current contributing editor at Poetry Wales.

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Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Competition Results

The winning and shortlisted poems will feature in issue 40 of Southword.
The shortlist can be found here.

Concerto by Nicholas Hogg
(Leicester, England)

Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester. He is the author of Show Me the Sky, nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Tokyo, for which he received an Art Omi fellowship in New York. His short stories have won numerous prizes and been broadcast by the BBC, and he was twice shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Award for young poets. His most recent work features in Ambit and The New European.

A Smallholding by Damen O’Brien
(Queensland, Australia)

Damen O'Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet, living in Brisbane. His prizes include the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the New Guard Knightville Poetry Prize. In 2021, he won the Café Writers Poetry Competition. Damen has been published in many journals including StylusLit, Peril, Cordite, Island and Mississippi Review. Damen’s first book of poetry, Animals With Human Voices, is forthcoming through Recent Work Press in 2021.

The Dog, The Accordion and The Stars by Gerry Boland
(Roscommon, Ireland)

Gerry Boland is a Dublin-born author and poet. He writes for adults and for children and has published nine books to date, his latest being The Far Side of Happiness, a collection of short stories from Arlen House in 2018. His poetry books are Watching Clouds (Doghouse, 2011) and In the Space Between (Arlen House, 2016). In 2011 and 2012, O’Brien Press published his trilogy, A Rather Remarkable Grizzly Bear, the first of which, Marco Moves In, was nominated for an Irish Book Award. He has written two travel books on his native city, A Pocket Guide to Dublin (1994) and Stroller’s Guide to Dublin (1999), both from Gill & Macmillan. He has also published a collection of poems for the young reader, The Secret Life of Mothers. He lives in rural north Roscommon.

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