Award winners for 2024 include Paula Meehan, Arnold Horner, and Darragh McKeon
The June bank holiday marked the 53rd year of Listowel Writers’ Weekend, and as ever its prestigious awards were a highlight of the literary festival.
The weekend began with the presentation of the John B Keane Lifetime Achievement Award to President Higgins for his service to the arts in Ireland, and in celebration of the connection between his political and literary lives. President Higgins said he was deeply honoured, and that Listowel Writers’ Weekend had long been a space where creativity is encouraged and where new ideas can flourish.
The mighty Paula Meehan won the €12,000 Pigott Poetry Prize for her collection The Solace of Artemis (Dedalus Press).
In this collection Meehan’s attention is given over to the examination of interconnected lives—her own, the lives of her family, the human ecology of her native Dublin—and the unfolding of pattern-cycles in the non-human world.
Described by Martina Evans in The Irish Times as fierce and vital: “Meehan’s haunted poems are talismans held against personal loss and our changing, darkening world.”
Winning the Nilsson Local Heritage Award for the second time, Arnold Horner picked up the prize for his book, Mapping South Kerry (Wordwell). An award for the best work of heritage or history published in Ireland within the last year, Horner previously won the award for Mapping Laois (Wordwell), and this marks his fifth book with a mapping theme from Wordwell.
Arnold paid tribute to the patience and skill of publisher and designer Nick Maxwell, who has been crucial to some truly beautiful productions.
Arnold sees the award as recognition of the importance of early local maps, and of the value of regional heritage studies which go beyond a focus on individual places to take in much larger districts. “I’ve been given a near-ultimate recognition—the validation of a book on south Kerry by a judging group from north Kerry.”
Taking away the coveted Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award, was Darragh McKeon for Remembrance Sunday (Penguin), his much awaited publication following All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Verso).
“The novel explores the IRA bombing of Enniskillen in 1987 in unexpected and illuminating ways. Though this is an extremely political book, McKeon has no interest in the attribution of blame. He simply does not approach things in that way. There’s a gentleness and a thoughtfulness throughout, a lyricism, a search for meaning.”—Kevin O’Sullivan, in The Irish Examiner.
The Duais Foras na Gaeilge 2024 went to Sadhbh Moriarty for her poem ‘Amhdhorchact’, while The Poetry Collection Award went to Eilis Stanley for Thicker than Water, and the Single Poem Award went to Finola Cahill, for ‘The Death of a Foal’.
The winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award was Róisín Burke for Born Crying, and the Creative Writing for Adults with Learning Difficulties and/or Disabilities Award went to Aisling Walsh, for The Taste of Solitude.
Tadgh Fleming and Derry Fleming picked up the Social Media Story Telling Award, while author Pat Sheedy was presented with this year’s Writing in Prisons Award, a prize which has been running for 43 years.
