Judge: Enda Wyley
Enda Wyley is an award winning poet and children’s author. She was born and lives in Dublin, where she works as a teacher and as a writer. Enda holds an M.A in Creative Writing, Lancaster University.
Enda Wyley realised early in life that she wanted to write and after first appearing in print as a young teenager, she has since gone on to publish five collections of poetry - from her debut volume Eating Baby Jesus, through to Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems, published 2014.
Her books for children are Boo and Bear, I Won’t Go to China! and The Silver Notebook, O’ Brien Press. Her poems for children appear in anthologies Something Beginning with P, O’Brien Press and Once Upon a Place, edited by Eoin Colfer, Little Island, 2015.
She has received many awards for her writing and held several Writer in Residence positions. She was the inaugural winner of The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Melbourne University and received a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Fellowship, 2014. She has also worked in The Ark, a Cultural Centre for Children in Dublin as a Literature and Visual Arts Programmer.
Enda’s work has been widely anthologised and translated, including The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 & 5, The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, USA, 2010. She is a frequent Arts contributor on RTE Radio 1 to shows such as Sunday Miscellany, The Marian Finucane Show, Arena.
In March 2015 she became a member of Aosdána, established in 1981 to honour artists who have made an exceptional contribution to the arts in Ireland.