UCC lecturer wins prestigious award for book of Irish poetry

1 Dec 2020

Dr Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, UCC lecturer in Modern Irish, is the winner of the 2020 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for The Coast Road, a bilingual collection of poems.

Dr Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, UCC lecturer in Modern Irish, is the winner of the 2020 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for The Coast Road, a bilingual collection of poems.

The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry was established in 1997 to honour outstanding Irish poets. This prize is awarded annually by a committee of the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St Thomas, Minnesota. The prize honours both the literary achievement of the poet and their contribution to the community of writers in Ireland.

Dr Ní Ghearbhuigh was originally invited to the University of St Thomas in April 2020 to be formally presented with the award. Due to travel restrictions, however, the trip has been postponed to April 2021. A selection of Dr Ni Ghearbhuigh’s most recent work will appear in the next issue of the New Hibernia Review, the journal of the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St Thomas.

The Coast Road (Gallery Press) is a collection of Dr Ní Ghearbhuigh’s Irish-language poetry, with translations into English by Vona Groarke, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Billy Ramsell, David Wheatley and others. Among the book’s themes are collapsing ages and traditions, loss, longing, language and silence.