Niamh Prior, PhD candidate in Creative Writing, in the School of English at UCC, has been awarded a PhD Scholarship from the Irish Research Council, to support the completion of her doctoral work. Congratulations Niamh!

The School of English at UCC is wonderfully represented in the current issue of Poetry Magazine. Former Writer in Residence, and now Lecturer in Poetry on the MA in Creative Writing, Leanne O’Sullivan has three poems for her husband, Cal Doyle, a student on the MA in Irish Writing & Film has his poem Echolocator, and Dean Browne, who is about to start an MA in Medieval to Renaissance Literature, has his poem Tabernacle. Congratulations!

This Dust of Words: Poetry and/as Translation

A series in which contemporary European poets read and discuss their work in the company of their English-language translators, running September – December 2015 at UCC. Starting with Jan Wagner and Iain Galbraith. Jan Wagner is a poet, essayist, and translator of Anglo-American poetry. He has published the poetry collections Probebohrung im Himmel (“A Trial Drill in the Sky“, 2001), Guerickes Sperling (“Guericke’s Sparrow“, 2004), Achtzehn Pasteten (“Eighteen Pies”, 2007), Australien (“Australia”, 2010) and Regentonnenvariationen (“Rain Barrel Variations”, 2014) and, as translator and editor, collections of selected poems by James Tate, Matthew Sweeney, Simon Armitage and Robin Robertson. Iain Gilbraith is a poet, essayist and editor, as well as translator of Jan Wagner, Raoul Schrott, Michael Donhauser, Peter Handke, Natascha Wodin, Ulrike Draesner and others. This Dust of Words website here.

Jan Wagner will read from his poetry on Tuesday 15 September 2015 @ 6pm in the CACSSS Seminar Room, UCC.

Iain Galbraith will give a talk entitled ‘Translation and/in the Poetry of John Burnside’ on Wednesday 16 September 2015 @ 6pm in the CACSSS Seminar Room, UCC.

Niamh Prior, Phd candidate in creative writing, has been shortlisted for the Dermot Healy International Poetry Competition with her poem, Surf Sestina. Another UCC creative writing student, Kathleen O’Brien, was longlisted for the prize.

This is the second year of the prize held in conjunction with the Five Glens Arts Festival in Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, (August 21 -23.)  Niamh’s short-listed poem is part of a collection she submitted for her MA in Creative Writing.  She will give a reading at the festival on August 22.

Award-winning dramatist Michael West has been appointed as UCC’s Writer-in-Residence for 2015/16. Born in Dublin in 1967, West is a co-founder with Annie Ryan, of the Corn Exchange theatre company.

A noted adaptor of literary work, West has collaborated in Corn Exchange productions of Joyce’s Dubliners, Nabokov’s Lolita and most recently, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride.  His play Freefall won an Irish Times Theatre Award for best new play and best director in 2009 and productions of Man of Valour, Dubliners, Everyday, Dublin By Lamplight, Foley and The Seagull have all won Irish Playwright and Screenwriters Guild awards. He has also translated many texts, including The Separation of Body and Soul by Calderón and Death and the Ploughman (Johannes von Saaz).

His latest play, Conservatory, was staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2014.

West has been an adjunct professor in drama at Trinity College Dublin and he has taught playwriting at the Lir Academy, Dublin. While at UCC, he will teach on the MA in Creative Writing and offer workshops for the university community at large.

Lecturer in Creative Writing Mary Morrissy was the writer in residence at this year’s Trieste Joyce School (June 30 – July 4). She gave a reading to conference delegates and Joyce scholars from her IMPAC Prize-nominated novel, The Rising of Bella Casey (Brandon) and from Dubliners 100, the Tramp Press centenary collection of short stories featuring new versions of Joyce’s Dubliners. This is the 19^th year of the School in Trieste, where James Joyce lived and worked for over a decade in the early years of the 20^th century.

Madeleine D’Arcy, graduate of UCC’s inaugural MA in Creative Writing class (2013/14) has been awarded the £1,000 Readers’ Choice award in this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut collection of stories, Waiting for the Bullet (Doire Press).

Now in its ninth year, the Edge Hill Prize is the only UK award that recognises excellence for a published collection of short stories. The 2015 judging panel included the Guardian’s Chris Power, the 2014 Readers’ Choice winner Rachel Trezise and Edge Hill University’s Dr Ailsa Cox.

Kirsty Gunn won the overall prize for her collection, Infidelities (Faber & Faber). The winners were announced at London’s Free Word Centre on July 2nd.

Speaking at the ceremony, Edge Hill Prize co-ordinator Dr Ailsa Cox, Reader in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill University, praised the entire shortlist as showing “the huge range and diversity of short story writing today, and how many risks writers are taking with the form, with stories based on, amongst other things, twitter fiction, autobiographical memories, oral history and role-playing games. All of these collections are winners”.

On June 18th Dr Éibhear Walshe will be reading from his novel, ‘The Diary of Mary Travers’ at the University of San Salvador in Buenos Aires, to be introduced by the Irish Ambassador, Justin Harmon. You can read more about this here.

Our colleague Dr Éibhear Walshe contributes to the ‘Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks‘ series in the Irish Times with his assessment (with Fintan O’Toole), of Elizabeth Bowen, who was born on the 7th of June in 1899. You can read the full article here.

A century of creativity: This project by The Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy assesses Ireland’s literary and visual arts over the past century. Every week, the Irish Times profiles one work from each of the 100 year.