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Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship Winner, Valentine Jones
The School of English & Digital Humanities, along with the family of Eoin Murray, are delighted to announce that this year’s Eoin Murray Memorial Scholar is Valentine Jones!
Valentine Jones is a writer and poet from Limerick. Places they have been published include Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, The Wild Umbrella, Iris Breac, the From the Well anthology, and the upcoming 21st issue of Skylight 47. In 2025 Valentine performed at the Cork International Short Story Festival, and is set to perform at the 2026 Cork International Poetry Festival as part of the Prebooked Poetry Introductions. They are in their first year in UCC, studying English and Gaeilge. They have received the Edna O’Brien Young Writers Award and the Sr. Joan Bowles Youth Award. They are a Quercus Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship student at UCC.
On Jones's winning work, the judges had this to say: 'Shuddersheen colour, dampening to / mudlife brown'... Valentine Jones is a precociously talented stylist, whose work is saturated with vivid, often surreal, imagery and anchored in concrete detail, creating image-rich poetry that sticks with you long after it's been read. The poetry bends and plays with reality in ways that are inquisitive, philosophical, full of unexpected images - and, to boot, a pleasure to read. This is exciting and unusually mature work, poems that stand out for their originality of voice and imagination, their mix of reflection and observation — all of which creates a new and entire world within each one. This is a young poet in their seedtime who is fully deserving of the support and recognition of the EM Scholarship.
Also highly commended (in a very competitive field) were: Claire Dineen and Sinéad De Búrca. Please see below for the judges' praise of their work:
Claire Dineen
"Inventive, surprising, always entertaining , Claire Dineen’s forthright poetry asserts a bold new voice that is at once refreshing and questioning. It is visceral and ambitious work with real presence, trusting in the power of its own imagery and paring back explanations. The work is engaged by intertextuality and mythology, by the processes by which language makes meaning and how one might allow a space for the reader to bring this meaning to bear. In other words, Dineen is a sensitively attuned poet with an informed subversive streak, who will no doubt continue to fructify as an artist."
Sinéad De Búrca
"De Búrca is a striking fílíocht with emotional depth and imaginative range. Moving between lyrical intimacy, philosophical reflection and wry humour, the work explores the unstable relationship between self and world with clear linguistic ambition and an insightful instinct for voice. The themes reminded us very much of Eoin's own, and we have no doubt that this writer has a very bright future ahead on the page."
The award was judged this year by John Fitzgerald, Sadhbh Moriarty, and UCC writer-in-residence Dean Browne. You can learn more about (and support) the scholarship here: https://eoinmurray.org/index.html.
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