The judges for next year's Irish TimesPoetry Now Award are Kit Fryatt, Sean O'Brien and Joe Woods.
The €5,000 award, presented annually to the author of the best single volume of poems published by an Irish poet or an Irish publisher in the previous year, will be announced at next year's DLR Poetry Now - International Poetry Festival (March 26th-29th), following the announcement of a shortlist of five titles earlier in March. Previous winners of the award include Harry Clifton, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Dorothy Molloy.
Kit Fryatt is a lecturer in English at Mater Dei Institute of Education, Dublin. Her book on Austin Clarke will be published next year, she has lectured at the Yeats International Summer School and writes reviews and criticism for a number of British and Irish journals. She is co-curator of the Wurm im Apfel poetry reading series, a monthly fixture at the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin.
Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, playwright, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He is professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, a vice president of the UK's Poetry Society, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the 2007 recipient of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award. His collection, Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001was published in 2002. His six individual poetry collections have all won awards, most recently The Drowned Book, which won both the 2007 Forward and TS Eliot prizes.
Joseph Woods is a poet and director of Poetry Ireland. A winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, his two collections, Sailing to Hokkaido(2001) and Bearings(2005) are both published by the Worple Press, UK. In 2007 he co-edited Our Shared Japan(Dedalus Press) an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry concerning Japan.
For more information contact Carolyn Brown (producer, DLR Poetry Now) at cbrown@dlrcoco.ie, 01-2719532 or the Arts Office, Marine Road, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.
