The trustees of the Ireland Chair of Poetry are delighted to announce Molly Twomey as the recipient of the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. Molly was nominated by the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paul Muldoon and the nomination was confirmed by the trustees of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust.
The Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary is awarded annually to a poet of promise and enables the recipient to reside for a period of four weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan.
Commenting on their selection the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust said:
‘Molly Twomey is an exciting early career poet who has taken to heart Ezra Pound’s exhortation to make it new. Her poems force us to look afresh at aspects of the world — a man being massaged as “a bottle of ketchup,” a Coke as “a huge cup of starless sky” — in ways that are quite indelible. We are confident that a period of intensive work at Annaghmakerrig would be a terrific boon, both for her and us, her readers.’
Speaking in response to the news Molly said:
‘It is an absolute dream to be nominated by the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paul Muldoon for the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. To be acknowledged in this generous way by a poet I deeply admire means a great deal to me. I would like to extend my gratitude to the Trustees and to everyone at the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust for their tireless support of poets throughout Ireland. Opportunities like this are what keep so many of us writing. I look forward to my stay in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre where I hope to rescue abandoned first drafts and to sow the seeds of new work.‘
Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The Irish Times, Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. Her first collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and the Farmgate National Poetry Award. She runs an online international poetry event, Just to Say, sponsored by Jacar Press. In 2021, she was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary.