News
THE SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE FOR POETRY
PRIZE FOR FIRST FULL COLLECTION 2012
Supported by Glucksman Ireland House,
New York University
Calling all poets. Did you have your first collection published between 1 January and 31 December 2011? Yes? Read on.
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry invites submissions for the Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection 2012.
This year we are very excited to announce support from Glucksman Ireland House, New York University. Located in the heart of New York's Greenwich Village, Glucksman Ireland House is the centre for Irish Studies at New York University. Glucksman Ireland House also organise weekly public events during the academic year, as well as a monthly traditional Irish music series. See their website http://irelandhouse.fas.nyu.edu/page/home
As part of the prize the winner will be invited to give a reading at the Glucksman Ireland House in New York, including travel expenses, three nights’ accommodation and an honorarium of $1000.
The deadline for entries is Friday 27 April 2012.
Download Entry Forms and Terms and Conditions here
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry offers an intense week of creative practice in the Poetry Summer School 2012 which runs from June 25-29.
The week comprises a variety of sessions with seminars, group workshops and one-to-one tutorials with creative writing tutors. There will also be staff and student poetry readings. This year sessions are being offered by our own poets, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn and Sineád Morrissey as well as by Gerald Dawe from the Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College Dublin and Jeff Thomson, a visiting Fulbright Fellow from the USA.
Interested applicants should send a sample of their work (4-6 poems) to Gerry Hellawell, Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, School of English, Queen's University Belfast, BT7 1NN by Friday 30th March at the lastest. Successful applicants will be informed by the beginning of May.
For any further information contact Gerry Hellawell at g.hellawell@qub.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)28 9097 1070.
Get Into Reading at Queen’s: What can literature do for you?
2011 marks the beginning of an exciting new project between Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and the pioneering social charity, The Reader Organisation,which aims to bring about social change by sharing great literature with people of all ages, from all backgrounds, and with all abilities.
Through weekly, read aloud sessions, the Get Into Reading model promotes a deeper, more personal engagement with literature and focuses on its practical uses for and in the real world. In other words, it’s about experiencing what literature can do for you.
Patricia Canning, a PhD graduate of Queen’s, is the group facilitator and will be delivering the weekly sessions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry (48 University Road) on Thursdays from 12.30-2pm. Come along and join the reading revolution!
For further information contact Patricia on patriciacanning@thereader.org.uk or view the website of the organisation on www.thereader.org.uk
The SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE PRIZE FOR POETRY 2011
Awarded for a First Collection
Supported by Hewlett Packard Ireland
From a field of over 40 books, to the shortlist of 5, to finding the book that, in the opinion of the judges, is the best first collection of poetry published in Britain and Ireland in the past year. Not an easy task.
But eventually the judges of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry made their choice.
This year’s winner of the Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry is Katharine Towers, with her first collection The Floating Man, published by Picador.
On Friday 25 November, at an award ceremony at Queen’s University, Katharine Towers was presented with her prize of £1000 by fellow poet John Montague.
Katharine Towers said, “I’m thrilled and honoured to receive this wonderful prize from the Seamus Heaney Centre. Publishing a first book inevitably feels like pushing a very fragile little boat out into the unknown. Winning this award will inspire me to keep writing the very best poems I can. I’ll do my utmost to live up to it!”
Harry Clifton, Ireland Professor of Poetry and chairman of the Heaney Centre’s judging panel, said of the collection “'The Floating Man’, as a first collection should be, is a mix of rich promise in some directions, full achievement in others”.
Katharine Towers was born in London in 1961 and read Modern Languages at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has an MA in Writing from Newcastle University and lives in the Peak District with her husband and two daughters.
Picador describe the collection thus: ‘Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.’
Thanks were given to Hewlett Packard Ireland for their support of the prize.
STUDENT SUCCESS
Sheila Llewellyn (MA in Creative Writing) has won joint First Prize in the RTE PJ O'Connor Radio Drama Awards for 2011 with her play 'The House on Shareni Street', winning 4,500 Euros. The play is set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and Sheila has been developing it since starting the MA in Creative Writing at the Centre last year. The play will be produced and broadcast sometime in July in the RTE Radio One Drama slot on Sunday evenings. For more information go to http://www.rte.ie/radio1/pjoconnorawards/
Sheena Wilkinson, graduate and currently an ACNI Affiliate with the Seamus Heaney Centre,
Writing for Radio Workshops
Malachi O'Doherty, writer in residence, will be conducting a series of workshops on writing talks for radio, modeled on the Thought for the Day format.
The workshops will be on alternating Tuesday evenings from March 22. Places will be strictly limited to 12, so anyone interested should contact Malachi directly at mal.odoherty@qub.ac.uk.
