News

The winners have been announced for the second Leaf Memoir Competition. First place was awarded to Eileen Curran for her piece entitled 'Waking the Dead', and the runner-up entry was ‘Rules’ by David Williams.

The winners will appear in Issue 4 of the Leaf Writers’ Magazine and all winning and commended entries will be published in an anthology over the course of the next few months.

For further information about this publication, please visit the Leaf Books website.

The new issue of Shamrock (No 17) has a big selection of Greek haiku in English translation, an essay, a selection of international haiku, and a haibun. The results of the annual Readers' Choice Award appear at the top of the page, and you can read all the winning haiku and senryu.

 Now available online here

Poetry Ireland Education are delighted to announce that Writers' In Schools are now offering primary and post-primary schools in Northern Ireland the opportunity to apply for support for a visit or residency by a writer or storyteller.

This has been made possible through lottery funding support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Click here for more information.
 

Peter Sirr has been awarded the 2011 Michael Hartnett Prize in Poetry. The prize of €6500 is awarded to a single collection, that must be a poet's third or subsequent book published in the last two years.

Sirr, born in Waterford, a member of Aosdána, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1982 and a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

The adjudicators for the award were James Harpur, Thomas McCarthy and Mary O'Malley.

Jackie Kay, in the Guardian, celebrates the renaissance of poetry publishing.

It used to seem funny to me how us poets called readings "gigs" – just to pretend we were pop stars. We'd meet each other on the road and say, "Done any good gigs recently?" But now it doesn't seem all that funny: not when a thousand people turn up for a poet at Latitude, or hundreds of people listen to poetry in the Clapham Grand at Book Slams and shout and cheer like they would at a pop concert, doing everything except singing along.

 Read the full article here .