Poetry Night & Poetry Competition Awards

Join host Patrick Deeley as he speaks to poets Damien Donnelly, Linda McKenna and Gustav Parker Hibbett about a life in poetry. This will then be followed by the announcement of the winners of the 2024 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition.

Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea. Keepsake is his eighth collection of poems with Dedalus Press.  His previous collections include The End of the World, Groundswell: New and Selected, and The Bones of Creation.  His work has featured in many anthologies and literary journals worldwide as well as being translated to French, Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian and other languages.  He received the 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for poetry, and his other awards include the Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, and the Bisto and Eilis Dillon Awards for Children’s Literature.  His best-selling, critically acclaimed memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, was published by Transworld in 2016.  

Damien B. Donnelly is the award-winning author of the poetry pamphlet Eat the Storms, a Stickleback micro-collection & the conversational pamphlet In the Jitterfritz of Neon, co-written by Eilín de Paor, all published by Hedgehog Poetry Press who also published his first full collection Enough! in August 2022. He’s the host & producer of Eat the Storms, the poetry podcast and EIC of The Storms, a printed journal of poetry, prose & visual art. His work appears in various journals, online & in print. His second collection, Back from Away, was published by Turas Press, May 2024.

Linda McKenna is from Kinsealy in North County Dublin but has lived in Downpatrick since 1995. Her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2020. Her  second collection, Four Thousand Keys, has just been published by Doire Press in Autunm of this year (2024).

She won the Seamus Heaney Award for new writing in 2018 and the Red Line Festival in the same year and has had poems shortlisted for other awards.

She has had poems published in, among other publications, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Acumen, Atrium, One, The Stony Thursday Book, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Abridged, Skylight 47, The High Window, Raceme, The Poetry Bus, The Lonely Crowd, Causeay/Cabhsair, The Waxed Lemon and has undertaken commissions for the Community Arts Partnership’s The Way It Is project  and Poetry Jukebox/Quotidian’s Ambiguities and Lexicon curations.

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Originally from New Mexico, they are currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist and a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, is published by Banshee Press in 2024. You can also find them on Twitter (@gustav_parker) and Instagram (@gustavparker).