Announcement of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award to Andrew Eaton

The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust are delighted to announce that Andrew Eaton will be the second recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award.

Andrew, a Belfast-based poet  who studied in both Missouri State University in the U. S. A.  and St. Andrews in Scotland before undertaking a Ph.D in Creative Writing (poetry) in Queen’s University Belfast in 2011 lectures in poetry at Oxford Brookes University.

In 2016 Andrew published Sprung Nocturne (Lifeboat Press, 2016), as well as featuring in The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poetry from the North of Ireland, anthology (Blackstaff Press, 2016).

Over the last few years Andrew has also been the recipient of several prizes and awards including Ploughshares Emerging Writers Competition (2017), The Donald Everett Axinn Returning Contributor Award ($2,145); Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize (2016)  and Artist Career Enhancement Scheme (ACEs) award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 2015.

Following his own personal history Andrew has proposed that “the bursary will allow me to return to places of origin, personal and historical – such as the site of a Second World War prison camp, an abandoned university campus in California, and the desert sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona – in order to repair and reimagine histories of displacement, identity and violence.”