A nearly 90-year-old bilingual writer who only began writing in her 50s has won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, as the opening of the Cork International Poetry Festival got underway.
Deirdre Brennan, who has published 16 books including 12 collections of poetry in Irish and English, was presented with €2,000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English (including translations from other languages) published in 2022, after wowing judges Colm Breathnach, Eleanor Hooker, and Thomas McCarthy.
She won for , published by Arlen House.
The Dublin-born former Oireachtas Prize winner, who grew up in Tipperary, was born in 1934 and has lived in Carlow since 1965. She studied English and Latin at University College Dublin followed by a Higher Diploma in Education, and is a bilingual writer of poetry, short stories, and drama.
A founder member of Éigse Cheatharlach, originally a bilingual festival, she started to write in Irish, as well as English again some years later.
The winner was interviewed by director of the Cork International Poetry Festival, Patrick Cotter, and read two of her poems, Cashel Man and The Wandering Womb, for those in attendance at the launch.
Molly Twomey, a native of Lismore, County Waterford who graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork, won the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award for Work Among Vultures.
The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award was established in 2019 with sponsorship from The Farmgate Café in the English Market.
Cork International Poetry Festival, brought by the Munster Literature Centre and partnered by the runs until this Saturday and features readings, discussions and workshops by more than 40 poets from Ireland and abroad.
The Munster Literature Centre also produces the Cork International Short Story Festival each year.