We are delighted to announce that the winner of this years International Poetry Competition and tonight our Festival Poetry Event takes place on Saturday 22nd of April at 8 PM upstairs in the wonderful The Mauretania Bar. We are honoured to have as our special guest Poet, the one and only, Stan Notte.

The winner of this years International Poetry Competition is… Dr. Lauren Alex O’Hagan for her poem “Immortality”.

Dr Lauren Alex O’Hagan is a visiting researcher in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University and a research associate in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. She specialises in the study of music memorabilia, media representations of Irish musicians and (online) fandoms, and has published extensively on Rory Gallagher – her hero and role model. She is the co-founder of the Rewriting Rory blog (www.rewritingrory.com), set up to shine a positive light on the final decade in Rory’s career.

This years highly commended poets are (in no particular order.):

Ankh Spice
Mandy Jane Steel
Kelly Munro
Frankie Griffin
Theresa McCormack
MG Stephens
Maureen Gallagher
Frank Farrelly
Eileen Carney Hulme
Ken Hickey
Olha Matso
Seamus Harrington

Thank you to everyone who entered, we treasure your work, and it always very difficult for our judges to choose. This year was really tough.

All these poems will be published here in the coming days, and in our Festival journal.