News
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry offers an intense week of creative practice in the Poetry Summer School 2013 which runs from June 24-28.
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. Other tutors to be confirmed.
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 22nd March at the lastest. Successful applicants will be informed by the beginning of May. Submissions may be emailed to the address below.
For any further information contact Gerry Hellawell at g.hellawell@qub.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)28 9097 1070.
In November 2009 a delegation from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry visited Hyderabad, Kolkata, and New Delhi. The participants included Michael and Edna Longley, Professor Ed Larrissy, the singer Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, and myself.
I had the privilege, at a reception held at the home of the Irish Ambassador in New Delhi, of meeting the Indian poet Sudeep Sen, and before long we had established that our notions of poetry and its dissemination were very similar. I outlined to him the philosophy behind the Seamus Heaney Centre’s journal The Yellow Nib, and discovered that he also edited a journal called Atlas, which featured, among other things, the best of contemporary Indian writing in English.
It was a short step from that to invite him to edit a guest issue of The Yellow Nib (volume 6) featuring the best of Indian writing. So it came to pass. The result is a magnificent anthology which brings new voices to our attention, and features writers who have already made their mark in these islands: a book which reshapes our understanding of Indian literature.
This edition of the journal is available as a download only. Download here.
Rachael Boast
THE SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE FOR POETRY
PRIZE FOR FIRST FULL COLLECTION 2012
Supported by Glucksman Ireland House,
New York University
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, is delighted to announce the winner of the third Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry.
The Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best first collection published in the UK or Ireland in the preceding year and is awarded with support from Glucksman Ireland House at New York University, to support the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry. Glucksman Ireland House, the Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies at NYU, will support the award for the next five years through generous funding in honour of Thomas Quinlan, a third generation Irish-American teacher and educator.
The Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry for 2012 will be £1,000. In addition the winner will be invited to read at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University for the first annual Thomas Quinlan Lecture in Poetry, provided with travel, accommodation, and an honorarium. The first Quinlan Lecture is scheduled for Thursday, October 18, 2012.
The winner of this year’s Prize is Rachel Boast for her book Sidereal (Picador Poetry).
The Chairman of the judges for this year’s prize was Frank Ormsby, poet and co-editor of the The Yellow Nib, the journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre. His fellow judges were Professor Ciaran Carson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and Connie Voisine, poet and Fulbright Scholar at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Frank Ormsby says of the collection: ‘The resonant, robust lyrics and sequences in this beguiling collection are subtly weighted and consistently engaging. The world they create is affecting in its intensity and vibrant in its forms and images, drawing the reader in time after time. This is poetry that sets up “so bright a mirror/the room moves towards it.”’
The Seamus Heaney Centre Prize was inaugurated to celebrate the work of the Heaney Centre, and to honour its founding poet. The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry is a focal point for creativity in Ireland and is recognised as an international centre of creative and research excellence in the field of literature. Central to the Centre’s ethos is the encouragement of emerging talent.
Mrs Gerry Hellawell, email: g.hellawell@qub.ac.uk, tel: +44 (0)2890971070.
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
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.
