We are delighted to introduce to you the winner of the Mairtin Crawford Award for Poetry 2020 Alan Weadick.
Click here to read Alan's winning collection of poems.
About Alan
Alan has been publishing poems widely for over ten years, most recently in The Irish Times New Writing, Cyphers, The Honest Ulsterman, Skylight 47 and in the Culture Matters anthology "Children of the Nation". He has been short and long-listed for competitions including the Strokestown Poetry Festival, Listowel Writer's Week and the National Poetry Competition (UK, 2016), been nominated for a Hennessy Literary award (Emerging Poetry, also 2016) and won third prize in the Red Line Book Festival poetry competition in 2019. He also writes prose fiction and three of his short stories have been shortlisted and broadcast on RTE Radio for the Francis McManus Short Story competition. He lives in Dublin.
Judge's Moyra Donaldson and Naomi Foyle had the following to say about Alan's work;
Alan presented a set of poems that, like the best ice-cream parlour, offered a taste of everything that poetry can do: reassure and enrich us with the classic flavours of empathy and intimacy, invigorate with the tang of social comment, and surprise with bold, pungent swirls of the unusual, disturbing and surreal. The formal choices here are varied and controlled. These are poems composed with a craft strong enough to support their compelling defamiliarizing vision, and well-deserving of first place.
