For the eighth year, Glucksman Ireland House will welcome the winner of one of the poetry world’s most coveted prizes, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection as judged by a select committee at Queens University Belfast. This year’s judges were Professor Nick Laird, Chair of Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre; Professor Edna Longley, critic and Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast; and Dr Stephen Sexton, poet and lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centre.
The winner, Ned Denny, will read from his Unearthly Toys: Poems and Masks, (Carcanet Press, 2018) at the annual Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry. Ned will also read at the Irish Arts Center's Poetryfest.
Ned Denny was born in London in 1975 and has worked as a mailman, art critic, book reviewer, music journalist and gardener. His poems and remakes have appeared in publications including PN Review, Poetry Review, The White Review, Oxford Poetry, the TLS, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Carcanet published his first collection, Unearthly Toys: Poems and Masks,(Carcanet Press, 2018) in February 2018 and B, a version of the Divine Comedy, is forthcoming.
Seamus Heaney himself inaugurated the first Tom Quinlan lecture in 2011 at Glucksman Ireland House to endorse the importance of the first published book of poetry in a poet’s literary life. The lecture series, established by the Quinlan family, is named for Tom Quinlan in honor of his nearly 70 years as a poetry teacher and scholar. Quinlan, a member of Glucksman Ireland House since 1997, also reads at this event.