Cúirt Festival of International Literature announce New Writing Prize winners

The Cúirt Festival of International Literature has announced the winners of The Cúirt New Writing Prize, welcoming both talented writers to this year’s festival in April.

'Welcome to the World' by Shane Murphy marked the winning submission for the fiction category, while 'I’m Trying to Write a Poem About an Angel' by Siobhán Flynn won the poetry award.

Poet Gail McConnell, novelist Lisa McInerney (short fiction) and Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill (Irish Language) were chosen as the judges for the 2022 Cúirt New Writing Prize, which was sponsored by Tigh Neachtain in memory of Lena McGuire.

Regarding Shane Murphy's brilliant piece, fiction judge Lisa McInerney praised his "compassionate and raw" character study.

"'Welcome to the World' is a reflection on yearning and identity that was moving and surprising. This isn't the most polished work on the longlist, but to me it was the most promising. I felt the writer was at once curious and distanced enough from their protagonist to convey a memorable story. A sign, I think, of a gift for words and for people."

Shane Murphy thanked the judges and the Cúirt Festival of International Literature in a statement: "Thank you to Cúirt Festival and Lisa McInerney for this prize, and to Caoilinn Hughes, Fiachra Kelleher and Eimear Ryan for encouraging early drafts of this story."

Meanwhile, this years’ poetry judge Gail McConnell praised Siobhán Flynn's effervescent entry “I’m Trying to Write a Poem About an Angel”.

"Often the test of a true poem is the reader’s desire to return to it again and again," McConnell wrote. "I liked this poem when I read it first, but I noticed that I kept re-reading it, and each time I did, I noticed something new. It’s a poem that knows what it’s about – and it’s about a state of unknowing. The poem is asking what it is to be a self and what it is to be a body, and to try to answer its questions it looks beyond the binaries of gender (male and female), and presence (natural and supernatural), hoping ‘to find the right form’.

"It’s a poem after Analicia Sotelo’s ‘I’m Trying to Write a Poem about a Virgin and It’s Awful’, so it’s playing with imitation in its form as well as in its subject," Gail added. "It sets up a pair of relationships: of the poem with its influence, and of ‘I’ with ‘they’. There’s a lot about it to enjoy – humour, clear diction, good line endings and a self-consciousness about the whole strange endeavour of living and writing – but it’s the ending I marvel at. Wonderful’"

Siobhán Flynn expressed her delight at being named the poetry winner of the 2022 Cúirt New Writing Prize.

"Winning the 2022 Cúirt New Writing Prize is exhilarating. Writing is such a solitary thing, even more so during the last couple of years, sometimes it feels as if you’re writing into a void and your words are drifting away and disappearing like smoke so it really makes a difference when your work is recognised.

"This has gladdened my heart and invigorated my poetry muscles, I’m ready to take on that empty page again," Flynn continued. "Thanks to Gail McConnell and to everyone at Cúirt who makes this festival happen."

Each winner receives a €500 prize, while both Shane Murphy and Siobhán Flynn will read at the New Writing Showcase on 5th April at 11am in the Mick Lally Theatre.

The Cúirt Festival of International Literature runs from 4th to 10th April 2022.

Congratulations to Siobhán Flynn and Shane Murphy winners of the 2021 Cúírt New Writing Prize in the poetry and fiction categories respectively. Both will read at the New Writing Showcase on Tues 5 April 11:00. CNWP is kindly sponsored by @Tigh_Neachtain https://t.co/uMeBPE5jPa

— Cúirt Festival (@CuirtFestival) March 8, 2022

Notable Mentions/Shortlisted Submissions for fiction include 'Electric Ink' by Paula Dias Garcia - which Lisa McInerney referred to as "such a poignant and affecting account of unrequited love and loss" - and 'Fallow' by Serena Lawless.

"With its unflinching exploration of decline both physical and emotional, its bitter empathy, and its skilful descriptions of uncomfortable physical reality," McInerney said.

'Tine Leatromach' by Annemarie Nugent also received an honourable mention.

"It has a good storyline (essentially it's about desire and longing - in the story we meet two married women practicing making a campfire for the scouts trip, and we hear the inner voice of one of the women who has developed feelings for her friend, although both are married and have husbands and children)," Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill writes of the piece. "It is a clear piece of writing in Irish, with good descriptions and the last line is powerful and brings the story to a good close."

Notable Mentions/Shortlisted Submissions for poetry include 'Samhain' by Molly Twomey.

"I wipe the inner walls with bleach.’ This is the sentence I kept coming back to in the poem. Which walls? Those of the hospital ward, where the speaker resides? Or is it the speaker’s ‘bone cage’, where ‘the creature… bangs its hollow cup inside’?" Gail McDonnell writes.

"Or the insides of the newly carved pumpkin? Or the structure of the poem itself as it tries to communicate? So much is not said in the poem – and in the silence, difficulty and awkwardness of a child and parent speaking and not speaking in a hospital ward, food comes to bear real feeling: apples, a Twix, beets, a pumpkin and eggs. As winter approaches, these things speak, or seem to speak, where human language stutters, and this transference was what I most appreciated in the poem."

'Fásra' by Liam Mac Peaircín was also praised by Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill:

"The title of the poem means vegetation. There is a strong poetic voice in the poem, and it is wonderful that this poet is using the Irish language to hone their craft. There is a clear understanding of poetic language and imagery in this poem, as it comments on our mortality as human beings and the finality of death, but ends on a lovely hopeful note about how those we love can live on through the things they do while their in the world."

Lisa McInerney’s work has featured in Winter Papers, Stinging Fly, Granta and on BBC Radio 4, and in the anthologies Beyond The Centre, The Long Gaze Back and Town and Country. Her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, was published by John Murray in April 2017.

Revisit McInerney's Hot Press interview here.

Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill is a bilingual poet. Her first book, a collection of Irish language poetry Ait agus Iontach Bheith Beo was published by Coiscéim in 2020. She released her first spoken word poem ‘Why I’m Not A Buddhist’ under the alias The Puffin Poet in 2021.

Gail McConnell is the author of The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014), and two pamphlets of poetry: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018).