John Hewitt Birthday Readings

Two prize-winning poets and an emerging poetic voice feature in the annual reading to mark the birth date of John Hewitt, the celebrated Belfast-born poet, in the pub named after him!

With three acclaimed collections published by Gallery Press, Alan Gillis has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ in 2014. Iggy McGovern, born in Coleraine but now based in Dublin, has published three popular collections including The King of Suburbia, winner of the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award 2006. One of Poetry Ireland Review’s ‘Rising Generation’ 2016, Emma Must won the Templar Portfolio Award in 2014 and her debut poetry pamphlet, Notes on the Use of the Austrian Scythe, was published in 2015. The Society are also delighted to welcome special guest reader Frank Ormsby to the Birthday Reading line-up. His retrospective Goat’s Milk: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), includes work from four previous collections, A Store of Candles (Oxford University Press, 1977), A Northern Spring (Secker & Warburg, 1986), The Ghost Train (Gallery Press, 1995) and Fireflies (Carcanet, 2009), together with new poems. He has edited a number of anthologies and other books, was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989.

Presented in association with Poetry Ireland