Congratulations to St Anne’s Fellow, Prof. Patrick McGuinness, whose poetry book, Blood Feather (Cape Poetry, 2023), has been shortlisted for the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize for Poetry!
English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, have now announced the shortlist for the Prize, which recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.
The winner of this year’s PEN Heaney Prize will be announced on 2 December 2024 at a ceremony held at the Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. Tickets to the ceremony are free and available to book here.
The PEN Heaney Prize 2024 shortlist is:
ISDAL by Susannah Dickey (Picador Poetry)
The Coming Thing by Martina Evans (Carcanet Poetry)
Hyena! by Fran Lock (Poetry Bus Press)
Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness (Cape Poetry)
We Play Here by Dawn Watson (Granta Poetry)
A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton (Bloodaxe Books)
The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize has been judged by poets Nick Laird, Paula Meehan and Shazea Quraishi, with Catherine Heaney joining them as non-voting Chair and representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
Of Prof McGuinness’s book, the judging panel said:
‘Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave’.’
We wish him the best of luck! You can read more about the prize, and the other shortlisted titles, here.