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Category
1: The Strokestown International Poetry Prize Peter Fallon is a poet and publisher of the leading Irish publisher, The Gallery Press. His own collections of poems include The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987), Eye to Eye (1992) and his selected poems, News of the World, (1993 and 1998).The Georgics of Virgil, a translation, was published in September 2004. In 1990 he edited, with Derek Mahon, the best-selling anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. Peter Fallon received the 1993 O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute. In 2003 he was elected to Aosdána. He lives with his family in Loughcrew in County Meath. Vona Groarke was born in 1964. Her poetry collections with The Gallery Press include Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002), shortlisted for the Forward Prize (UK) in 2002 and winner of the Michael Hartnett Award in 2003 and Juniper Street (2005). In 2004 Flight and Earlier Poems was published by Wake Forest University Press in the US. Poetry Prizes include the Hennessy Award, the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize and the first Strokestown International Poetry Award. She now lives with her family in Manchester where she teaches creative wtiting at Manchester University. George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, fleeing to England with his family after the Hungarian Uprising and his work has always been defined by this dual background. Beginning with the publication of The Slant Door in 1979, he has written 13 collections of poetry. His 2004 collection Reel won the TS Eliot Prize. His translations from the Hungarian led Stephen Humphreys to declare that since 1984, Szirtes has done more than any other individual to introduce an international audience to 'a broad spectrum of the Hungarian canon'. |
| Category 2: The
Strokestown Irish/Gaelic/ Poetry Prize Gréagóir Ó Dúill was born in Dublin, raised in County Antrim, educated in Belfast, Dublin and Maynooth where he took his Ph.D. in English. Long associated with the Poets' House in Donegal, he was recently lecturer in contemporary writing in Irish in Queen's University, Belfast and currently lectures in creative writing in the Poets' House at Waterford Institute of Technololgy. He has published eight collections in Irish, a literary biography and a collection of short stories as well as two influential anthologies. He is more recently concentrating on work in English which has been widely published in journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States. He lives in Ranelagh in Dublin and in Gort a' Choirce in the Donegal Gaeltacht. Difficult Time (2002), in Gaelic only, in accordance with the positions outlined in his polemical essay 'Against Self-Translation'. His novels include Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin, The Warlock of Strathearn (1997), The Gay Decameron (1998) and The Cloud Machinery (2000). Dreuchd an Fhigheadair/The Weaver's Task: a Gaelic Sampler, which he edited and introduced, was published by in 2007. |
| Category 3: The
Strokestown Prize for humorous political or topical satire, or
invective, in verse.
Margaret Hickey is an an editor and writer. In 1999 she moved from London to a house beside the Shannon in Co Galway, and 2001 saw the publication of her first book, Irish Days, a collection of oral histories gathered from a group of men and women born in the first two decades of the 20th century. A long-standing member of the Maple Poetry Group in Portumna, she I helped to edit a poetry collection, Maple Leaves. In addition,she is Chairperson of the Loughrea poetry festival, Baffle. She was the winner of the first ever Strokestown satirtical poetry competition in 1998 |