Celia de Fréine writes in many genres in both Irish and English. Awards for her poetry include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Gradam Litríochta Chló Iar-Chonnacht and the British Comparative Literature Association Translation Award. Her plays have won numerous Oireachtas awards and her film and television scripts have won awards in Ireland and America. She has been nominated four times in different categories in An Post Irish Book Awards. Her most recent collection of poetry is Focal den Fhírinne : A Grain of Truth (Arlen House, 2024). In 2025 Arlen House will reissue her collection Aibítir Aoise : Alphabet of an Age as well as Even Still her first collection of short stories in English.
Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co Down. She has published ten collections of poetry and has had work commissioned for a variety of projects. Her latest collection, Bone House, was published by Doire Press in April 2021. She has also been involved in various collaborations with visual artists, most recently with Wexford artist Paddy Lennon resulting in the limited edition publication of artwork and poems, Blood Horses. In 2019, Moyra received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is currently working on a new collaboration with artist Pamela Greene, Grief is a Door, and an eleventh collection will be forthcoming in 2026.
Kerry Hardie’s ninth collection, We Go On, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2024. Previous collections from Bloodaxe are Where Now Begins , The Zebra Stood in the Night and a Selected Poems, co-published by The Gallery Press. She has six previous collections with the Gallery Press, as well as 3 three chapbooks published by H. U., The templar Press and The Clutag Press. She has won many prizes, including the Michael Hartnett Award, a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Award, The Suspended Sentence Award, The Laurence O’Shaughnessy Award, the IOTA chapbook award, The Irish National Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for The Irish Times Award. She has written two novels and a radio play which has also been performed live and has just completed another novel. Her short stories have been published in Ireland, Switzerland, France and the US. Her work has been widely translated and has been much anthologized. She is currently living in Carlow with her husband Seán and is a member of Aosdána.
David Hynes has been writing and performing his work all over Ireland, parts of Europe on three different continents for the best part of twelve years. He’s been published in numerous publications during those years. He’s been involved in the running of numerous spoken word nights in that time and presently he’s a member of both The Poetry Kiln Collective and The Rising Tide. He is the coordinator, curator and host of the Spoken Word at The Word tent in Mindfield. David Hynes also doesn’t like people who talk about themselves in the third person.
