Awards

Farmgate Café National Poetry Award

The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award was established in 2019 with sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, The Farmgate Café. The partnership between the Munster Literature Centre and the Farmgate received the Business to Arts 2019 Best Small Sponsorship Award. The award will be €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English (including translations from other languages) published in 2024, by a poet residing in Ireland. As of 2023, 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. The three judges for this year were Dean Browne, Mary O’Donnell and Maurice Riordan.

Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winner will receive their prize and present a short reading on May 13th. The full shortlist and winner will be posted here in April.

Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition

The prize reading will take place on Saturday May 17th.The winning chapbooks of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Superposition by Lauren O'Donovan and Drought / Diagnosis by Liza Katz Duncan, will be unveiled with readings.

Fool for Poetry Competition 1st Prize Superposition by Lauren O'Donovan

Lauren O’Donovan has won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and the Southword Subscriber’s Poetry Prize. She is fortunate to have her work sometimes published in journals and anthologies, most recently in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, and Southword. Lauren is co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing and Lime Square Poets, and a grateful recipient of Cork County Council Arts and Arts Council funding. She is an Irish writer, graduate of UCC, and lives in Cork with her family.

Fool for Poetry Competition 2nd Prize: Drought / Diagnosis by Lisa Katz Duncan

Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Common, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A 2024-25 Climate Resiliency Fellow, she lives in New Jersey (Lenni-Lenape), USA, where she teaches multilingual learners.

The Munster Literature Centre established the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition in 2005. It was established as an annual prize in 2015. The competition offers writers the opportunity to have their poems published in a high-quality production from the Munster Literature Centre's publishing branch, Southword Editions. The winners receive cash prizes as well as a reading and three nights' accommodation at the festival. You can see previous winners and buy their chapbooks at the bottom the page here.

Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition

The prize reading will take place on Saturday May 17th. The winning poem of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, ‘Dancing with Thierry Thieu Niang’ by Lani O'Hanlon will be read along with a selection of other poems.

Lani O'Hanlon is a dance artist, somatic movement therapist and writer living in a renovated cottage beside the sea in County Waterford. Her poetry collection Landscape of the Body was published in 2023 by the Dedalus Press. Her poetry is widely published and broadcast on RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany. She was the winner of the Poetry Ireland Trocaire Award in 2022 and other prizes include The Bridport Prize, Poetry on the Lake and the Hennessey New Irish Writing.

The Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition is an annual poetry competition for a single poem, named in honour of a late Irish poet long associated with the Munster Literature Centre. It's open to original, unpublished poems in the English language ofless than 40 lines on any subject, in any style, by a writer of any nationality, living anywhere in the world. Submissions are accepted from August to November annually. As well as a first prize of €2,000, and publication in the literary journal Southword, if the winner comes to Cork to collect their prize, we lavish them with hotel accommodation, meals, drinks and VIP access to the literary stars at the Cork International Poetry Festival.