The Strokestown International Prize 2018

Competition 2018

1st Prize € 2,000

Plus A week-long residency at Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat

2nd Prize € 700

3rd Prize € 500

Reading fees of € 300 for 5 shortlisted poets

The 8 shortlisted poems will be printed in the Strokestown Anthology 2018,

Competition opens 1st September 2017

Competition closes 1st December 2017

Judges Moya Cannon & Harry Clifton

Prize winner announced in Strokestown 6th May 2018

Judges Moya Cannon and Harry Clifton will read and consider all entries for this prestigious prize. Shortlisted poets will also be published in the forthcoming festival anthology, alongside the work of the judges and other featured readers at the festival.

Strokestown is Ireland’s longest-running poetry festival, and has established a reputation for friendly informality twinned with deep respect for poetry, poets and poetry lovers. Here’s your chance to take part in it. Entries will be accepted from Friday 1st September 2017, and will be until 1st December 2017. You may enter as early and as often as you choose for an entry fee of €6.00 per poem.

Judges

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with five published collections, the most recent being Keats Lives (Carcanet Press, Manchester). The mountains, the sea and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure too as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and our past.

Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has always been a deep interest and is a constant theme. She has given many readings with musicians and singers, among them the harper Kathleen Loughnane, the traditional singers Ma?ghréad and Tríona Ní Dhomhna?ll and the RTE Con Tempo String Quartet.

Moya has been invited to read in Ireland, Europe, in the Americas, North and South, in Japan and India. A selection of her work has been translated into Spanish by the distinguished Argentinian poet, Jorge Fondebrider and further translations to Portuguese and German will be published in 2017.

She has been honoured with the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and she was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2011. She was editor of the Poetry Ireland Review and is a member of Aosdána.

Harry Clifton was born in Dublin in 1952, and has lived in Africa and Asia, as well as more recently in Europe. He won the Patrick Kavanagh award in 1981 and has been the recipient of fellowships in Germany, France, the United States and Australia. He has published five collections of poems, including The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-88 and Night Train through the Brenner, with Gallery Press. On the Spine of Italy, his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, was published by Macmillan in 1999. A collection of short fiction, Berkeley’s Telephone, appeared from Lilliput Press in 2000. Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 was published by Wake Forest in 2007 and won the Irish Times Poetry Now award. He has taught in Bremen and Bordeaux universities, as well as Trinity College and University College Dublin. He returned to Ireland in 2004 and lives in Dublin. The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass was published by Wake Forest and Bloodaxe Books in 2012, and The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 in 2014. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2010 to 2013.

Photo: Pat McGuigan, Poetry Foundation

Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat www.anamcararetreat.com is awarding a week-long residency to the first prize winner of the Strokestown International Poetry Prize for a poem in the English Language category. Located just outside the colourful village of Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Anam Cara is a tranquil spot, structured to provide support and sanctuary for people working in the creative arts. It offers private and common working rooms as well as five acres of walking paths, thirty-four nooks and crannies, a river cascades and a river island, gardens, and a labyrinth meadow. Editorial consultation is also available. The prize is valued at €700. The dates of the residency will be arranged between the writer themselves and Anam Cara.