Ciaran Carson Fellows
These new annual Fellowships have been established in memory of the Seamus Heaney Centre’s founding director and are inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in poetry and prose.
Appointed to recent graduates from the PhD programme at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Fellows will be encouraged to carry on with their own creative work at this crucuial stage of their careers, and to contribute to our academic and extracurricular programmes.

Louise Kennedy is a prose writer. Her work has been published in The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly, Banshee and Winter Papers, with food writing in The Guardian and Irish Times, and scripts for RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. She was shortlisted for Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2019 and 2020. She has just completed a PhD, the critical component of which was on the writer Norah Hoult (1898-1984); in 2019 she wrote the introduction to the New Island Books reissue of Hoult’s 1948 novel Farewell Happy Fields. Bloomsbury will publish her debut short story collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, in April 2021.

Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat Press, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson, from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. Padraig is currently working towards their first full-length collection.
Fellows Events

In Conversation: Louise Kennedy & Lucy Caldwell
Lecture / Talk / Discussion
Date: 13/05/2021
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM
Location: Online

The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has appointed Louise Kennedy and Padraig Regan as the inaugural Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellows for 2020-21.