Loose Leaves

A literary roundup

Winner on his way

Irish audiences will get a chance to hear the winner of the 2009 £15,000 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, Philip Gross – which was announced in London on Monday – when he takes part in the Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Poetry Now festival in March.

Gross, who won for his collection The Water Table(Bloodaxe), was born in Cornwall in 1952 and lives in Penarth in South Wales. His previous collections include The Egg of Zero(2006), Mappa Mundi(2003), Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998(2001) and several collections for children. He is professor of creative writing at Glamorgan University. He won the award in a shortlist of 10 that included two Irish poets; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Sinéad Morrissey. Each shortlisted poet received £1,000.

Chair of the judging panel, poet Simon Armitage, said the winning title was a book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. “Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence.” Fellow-poets Penelope Shuttle and Colette Bryce made up the judging panel.

Poetry Now takes place from March 25th-28th at the Pavilion Theatre. Gross will give two readings; one on Friday 26th at 6.30pm, and a reading that morning for schoolchildren involved in the festival’s education programme. Festival details will be announced next month.

Jarama remembered

The Friends of Charlie Donnelly, the young Irish poet who died in the Spanish Civil War, are holding an International Brigade benefit to fund a monument in Spain to him and all Irish International Brigaders who died there during the 1936-1939 conflict. The evening of music, poetry and song takes place in the Teachers’ Club on Dublin’s Parnell Square on Friday January 29th from 8pm: tickets €8. Participants include Harry Owens, whose speciality is Irish involvement in the war, and poet and lecturer Ciaran Cosgrove.

The monument will be unveiled on February 27th and consists of an engraved stone from near Donnelly’s birthplace in Co Tyrone. It will be set in a mound of stones, 32 of which will be brought from Ireland – the rest coming from the Jarama battlefield where he and other brigaders died and which the monument will overlook. To sponsor a stone, contact Eddie O’Neill at 087-2712864 or eddietyrone@ gmail.com

Michael Longley talk

The West of Ireland in his own work and that of other writers, is the topic of a public lecture by poet and current holder of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, Michael Longley. It takes place on February 1st at 7.30pm in the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at UCD. Email info@irelandchairofpoetry.org to reserve a place

Hello Succour

The journal of new fiction and poetry, Succour, which has been called a " Grantafor the Facebook generation" by Time Out, has an event series, Succour Salons, which showcases work from writers it features. A salon will be taking place in Dublin on Thursday, January 28th, at the Sycamore Club, 9 Sycamore Street in Temple Bar, from 8pm to 11pm, with readings from Lawrence Fenton, Miriam Gamble, Órfhlaith Foyle, Maurice Scully and Grace Wells. Admission free. The current issue, Succour 10 – The Banal, is out at £5.95. See www.succour.org