Poetry Night & Poetry Awards

Poetry night is always a highlight of the Red Line Book Festival. This year join host and Red Line Poetry Competition Judge Annemarie Ní Churreáin as she speaks to fellow poets Amy Abdullah Barry, Breda Wall Ryan and Peter Sirr about their work. This will be followed by the announcement of the winners of the 2023 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition.

Amy Abdullah Barry, originally from Malaysia now lives in Ireland since 2003. Amy poems have been widely published, anthologised, awarded and translated. Awarded literature bursaries from the Arts Council and Words Ireland. She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and, an Honorary member of the Pablo Neruda Association, Italy. Amy is the founder of Global Writers. She regularly organises poetry & music events in her hometown, Athlone. She previously worked in the media, hotel and energy industry. A travel lover, she has performed her work in Ireland and internationally. Flirting with Tigers is her debut collection of poems published by Dedalus Press and launched by Thomas McCarthy in April 2023. 

Breda Wall Ryan lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow. Internationally published and anthologised, her many awards include The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and Dermot Healy International Poetry Award. A founder member of Hibernian Poetry and Green Kite Writers, her collections, In a Hare’s Eye (Shine/Strong Award 2016), and Raven Mothers (2018) are both from Doire Press who publish These are my People in autumn 2023.

Peter Sirr lives in Dublin. The Gallery Press has published his eleven poetry collections since Marginal Zones (1984), most recently The Gravity Wave (2019) which was a Poetry Society Recommendation and winner of the 2020 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. In his newly published essays, Intimate City, he takes us wandering through the streets of Dublin, past and present, tracing old routes and discovering new ones. He has won many awards for his work including the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Eamon Keane Award at Listowel Writers’ Week and the Michael Hartnett Award. He’s written plays for radio, a children’s book and criticism. He teaches literary translation in Trinity College and has led many workshops and mentoring sessions and is a member of Aosdána.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her publications include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. Of her work The Yale Review reports that she “often captures a whole world of cultural and historical implications in a single, simple, but metaphorically rich image”. Ní Churreáin is Guest Editor of Poetry Ireland Review Issue 140 and she is the incoming Poetry Editor of The Stinging Fly. Info: www.studiotwentyfive.com.