Irish Poet Wins International Prize

Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection, The Sun-fish.

Ní Chuilleanáin, born in Cork city in 1942, is a fellow and professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, and a member of Aosdána.

Her collection, published by The Gallery Press, was chosen from almost 400 entries across 12 countries during the prestigious Canada-based competition.

Ní Chuilleanáin participated in a reading, along with the other shortlisted writers, at a ceremony in Toronto last night before the winner of the $65,000 (€49,000) overall prize was announced.

Her work focuses on life in rural Ireland during incidents such as the Polo epidemic and the plight of Irish civilian rebels during the 1798 rising.

"I left the Bence-Joneses in the long grass / And drove back to the cross / And downhill again past the secret monument // To the dead of the battle of Kilnagros / Where the spruces whistle to each other and the carved stone is lost."

The judges said The Sun-fish reinforced convictions that Ní Chuilleanáin had ways of transforming and transporting her readers like no other.

“These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us,” they said.

Ní Chuilleanáin has previously won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Irish Times Award for Poetry, and the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute for her work.

Since 1975 she has been an editor and publisher of Cyphers, Ireland’s longest established literary periodical.

(DW/GK)