Jane Clarke's A Change in the Air shortlisted for Ireland's Farmgate Café National Poetry Award
Jane Clarke's third full poetry collection A Change in the Air is on the six-strong shortlist for Ireland's Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2024. The six finalists were announced on 3 April 2024, and the winner will be announced in Cork on 14 May. In 2023 A Change in the Air was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T S Eliot Prize, and was also longlisted for The Laurel Prize for nature writing and ecopoetry.
The €2000 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award is for the best full-length poetry collection in English (including translations from other languages) published in 2023, by a poet residing in Ireland. The three judges are Afric McGlinchey, Patrick Deeley and Molly Twomey.
Limited places are available for a reception at the Farmgate Café in Cork where the winning poet will receive their prize and present a short reading on Tuesday 14 May 2024. The event takes place on the opening night of the Cork International Poetry Festival, and runs from 6.30 to 8pm. It is free but ticketed. Book via Eventbrite here.
Details of the 2024 list of six finalists and their books can be found here.
The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award was established in 2019 with sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, The Farmgate Café. The partnership between the Munster Literature Centre and the Farmgate received the Business to Arts 2019 Best Small Sponsorship Award. The inaugural winner of the award was Cork poet Leanne O'Sullivan, who won the prize in 2019 for her book-length sequence A Quarter of an Hour.
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Jane Clarke's A Change in the Air was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and the T S Eliot Prize 2023. It was also longlisted for the 2023 Laurel Prize for ecopoetry and nature writing. This third collection by Jane Clarke is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world.
A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke’s widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019). The latter was shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020 as well as two other national Irish poetry prizes, and was longlisted for the UK's Ondaatje Prize.
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Books Ireland, Poetry Happening, Wednesday 24 May 2023
A lovely film of Jane Clarke reading her poem ‘Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson’s Wedding’ from A Change in the Air was featured on Books Ireland to mark publication here (and below). The collection was later reviewed by Eleanor Hooker in Books Ireland here.
[03 April 2024]
