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Southword Poetry Podcast: Mary O’Malley

Episode 28 with Mary O’Malley is now available anywhere you get podcasts Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara, and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at the Universidade Nova there. She served several years on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the…
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Submit to Southword

Unsolicited submissions of poetry and short fiction (for issue 51, winter 2026) will open as follows: POETRY: 1st ‒ 31st January FICTION: 1st ‒ 28th February Our Submittable account limit means that we can only receive 1000 submissions per month, so if we reach this limit before the end of January (for poetry) or February…
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Southword Poetry Podcast: Aifric Mac Aodha

Episode 27 with Aifric Mac Aodha is now available anywhere you get podcasts Aifric Mac Aodha was born in 1979. Her first collection, Gabháil Syrinx, was published in 2010. She has taught in St Petersburg, New York and Canada and has lectured in old and modern Irish at UCD. She lives in Dublin where she works for…
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Shangyang Fang: Inaugural Cork City International Poetry Fellow

Shangyang Fang will be our inaugural Cork City International Poetry Fellow. Details to follow in the coming weeks. Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. While studying civil engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he realized his bigger passion lies in the architecture of language and is…
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Orders processed until end of the week

We will be processing book orders until the end of the week (up until midday 19th December) but cannot guarantee they will arrive before Christmas. Any orders after this will be processed on our return (5th January).
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Southword Poetry Podcast: Isabelle Baafi

Episode 26 with Isabelle Baafi is now available anywhere you get podcasts. Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which is a Poetry Book Society (PBS) Recommendation, and Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS,…
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Farmgate Café National Poetry Award Entries

55 valid entries have been received for the Farmgate National Poetry Award for the best original collection in English (or translated into English for the first time) published by a poet living on the island of Ireland in the calendar year of 2025. The award is worth €2000. A shortlist will be announced late March…
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Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition Results

The tied-for-first-prize manuscripts of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition are We Fall, We Carry by Róisín Leggett Bohan and Playing Paradise by Katie Hale. Their chapbooks will be published next year and launched at the Cork International Poetry Festival. We have also highlighted the finalists and 21 highly commended entries below. Winners Playing…
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Southword Poetry Podcast: Gerry Murphy

Episode 25 with Gerry Murphy is now available anywhere you get podcasts. Gerry Murphy is an Irish poet, born in Cork in 1952. His first poetry collection was A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards (1985, 1992). He has since published many collections with The Dedalus Press including Rio de la Plata and All That (1993), The Empty Quarter (1995), Extracts from the…
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1961: Frank O’Connor’s Cork | Monitor BBC Broadcast

Frank O’Connor, the celebrated Irish short-story writer, novelist, essayist, and poet, revisits the city of his birth, where he lived for twenty-eight years and which provides the setting or inspiration for many of his stories. He speaks to Huw Wheldon about what Cork means to him, reflects on his childhood there and why he left.…
