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. This award is €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English published in 2025 by a poet residing in Ireland. Judges this year were were Ailbhe Darcy, Maya C. Popa and Thomas Dillon Redshaw. Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winning poet will receive their prize and present a short reading on 12th May. Below is the shortlist in alphabetical order.

Shortlist

After Party by Dean Browne (Picador)

Dean Browne is an award-winning poet from Co. Tipperary, Ireland. His debut collection After Party is published by Picador and is a Poetry Society Recommendation. Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021, and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, won the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it is published by Smith|Doorstop (2022). His poems are widely published internationally, in outlets such as New York Review of Books, Columbia Review, London Magazine, Poetry Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, PN Review, Poetry Magazine (Chicago).

The Convent of Mercy by Tom French (The Gallery Press)

Tom French's collection Touching the Bones (Gallery Press, 2001) was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, 2002. The Gallery Press has also published The Fire Step (2009), Midnightstown (2014), The Way to Work (2016), The Last Straw (2018, Irish Times/Poetry Now Award shortlist), The Sea Field (2020) and Company (2022), shortlisted for the inaugural Yeats Society Poetry Prize and winner of the 2023 Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ Week. The Convent of Mercy, his eighth collection, was published in July 2025.

Hymn to All the Restless Girls by Annemarie Ní Churreáin (The Gallery Press)

Annemarie Ní Churreáin comes from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her third poetry collection, Hymn to All the Restless Girls, published by The Gallery Press (2025), appears in The Irish Times Best Poetry of 2025 and among the RTÉ Culture Best Irish Books of the Year. She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award, the Markievicz Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship. Ní Churreáin is a recent Writer in Residence at The Hawthornden Foundation, New York. She is the poetry editor at The Stinging Fly.

The Slipping Forecast by Ross Thompson (Dedalus Press)

Ross Thompson is a poet and teacher from Bangor, Co. Down. His work has been widely featured in many local and international magazines and anthologies, and he has contributed to television and radio. Most recently, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio project that has been adapted by Northern Ireland Screen into a series of archival short films. His poetry debut Threading The Light was published by Dedalus Press in 2019. His second collection, The Slipping Forecast, was published in April 2025.

Chic to be Sad by Molly Twomey (The Gallery Press)

Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford and now lives in Cork. Her first collection, Raised Among Vultures was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award. She was awarded the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and an Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2024. Her second collection, Chic to be Sad, was published in July 2025.

Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition

Joint Winners

The winning chapbooks of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Playing Paradise by Katie Hale and We Fall, We Carry by Róisín Leggett Bohan, will be unveiled with readings.

Fool for Poetry Competition Joint Winner
Katie Hale is a novelist and poet, based in Cumbria. She won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of two novels: The Edge of Solitude and My Name is Monster. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Northern Writers’ Award, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. She has held Writer in Residence positions in numerous countries, including Australia, the US and Svalbard. Katie also mentors young writers through Writing Squad.

Fool for Poetry Competition Joint Winner:
Róisín Leggett Bohan is a writer from Cork. In 2025, she was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and was longlisted for the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition. Her work features in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Manchester Review, Dedalus Press, and was showcased on RTÉ Radio 1. She is the co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing, holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC, and is a grateful recipient of an Arts Council Literature Bursary and Cork City Council Artist Bursaries.

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

Gregory O'Donoghue Competition 1st Prize
Anthony Lawrence has published nineteen collections of poems and a novel. His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the Ginkgo prize for Eco poetry and the New South Wales Premiers Award. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.

The winning poem of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, ‘Seeing Red’ by Anthony Lawrence will be read by a local actor. It will also be published in issue 50 of Southword.

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.