Farmgate Café National Poetry Award Winner

With sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, the Farmgate Café, this award is €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English published in 2023 by a poet residing in Ireland. Judges this year were Afric McGlinchey, Patrick Deeley and Molly Twomey. Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winning poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, will receive her prize and present a short reading on May 14th.

Tickets for this reading, the opening event of the Cork International Poetry Festival, are free but booking is required.

Overall Winner

The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Gallery Press)

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.

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 and has been won by Kevin Graham for The Lookout Post (Gallery Press).

Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award

The Lookout Post by Kevin Graham (Gallery Press)

The Lookout Post, Kevin Graham’s first collection, is a book of uncommon poise and range. It includes harrowing accounts of illness, a suicide, and joyous celebrations of fatherhood and family life. Whether it’s in the extended sequence, ‘Sketches’, which draws on the letters of Van Gogh, or shorter poems which pay homage to Wendell Berry, Zinedine Zidane and Derek Mahon or ruminate on Elizabeth Bishop’s sojourn in Ireland, The Lookout Post seamlessly melds the ordinary and the literary. As the book’s title might suggest this is a collection of acutely observed reflection by an outstanding new and assured voice.

Shortlist

The shortlist in alphabetical order: A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke (Bloodaxe Books), The Lookout Post by Kevin Graham (The Gallery Press), The Solace of Artemis by Paula Meehan (Dedalus Press), The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (The Gallery Press), The Swerve by Peter Sirr (The Gallery Press), and Watching for the Hawk by Breda Spaight (Arlen House).