The winners of the 46th annual Hennessy Literary Awards were announced in Dublin last night.
Poets, novelists and short story tellers came together as Hennessy revealed the winner of the First Fiction, Emerging Fiction and Emerging Poetry categories.
The winners were chosen by esteemed authors Elizabeth Day, Mike McCormack and The Irish Times New Irish Writing page editor, Ciaran Carty.
Sean Tanner was chosen as the winner of the First Fiction category for his piece ‘I Could Have Been A Dancer’.
Sean, who lives in Cork with his wife and son, said: “With years of research behind me, hangovers seemed an obvious subject to write about. I was trying to capture some of the abstracted terror and tangential insight that often accompany this fallen state. It was supposed to be light hearted, but in the middle it just ran off on me.”
Winner of the Emerging Poetry category was Una Mannion for her poem ‘Crouched Burial’ which was inspired from personal experience as a teenager.
She said: “The summer I was fifteen, a child’s body was found in our field in Culleenamore, County Sligo. The child, 2000 years old, was lying in a crouched position, on her side, fetal, arms holding herself.
“The imprint of her small frame in the earth and details of her burial shaped this poem.”
Rachel Donohue won the Emerging Fiction prize for her piece ‘The Taking of Mrs Kennedy’ and was also named as the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year.
Rachel was previously shortlisted for the Hennessy First Fiction Award in 2013 and the Hennessy Emerging Fiction award in 2014.
Rachel said: “This story really began as a ghost story. I wanted to capture the sense of shadows under a seemingly perfect life. Caravaggio’s painting The Taking Of Christ fed into this mood of a dark fate and along with it came the idea of betrayal.”
This year celebrated poet Vona Groarke, who won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award in 1993, was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame.
She has also won The Brendan Behan Memorial Prize, The Micheal Hartnett Award, The Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition in 2003, and is a member of Aosdána.
She lives in Manchester where she teaches in the centre for new writing at the University of Manchester.
- The full shortlist of finalists for the Hennessy Literary Awards was:
First Fiction:
- Emerging Fiction:
- Emerging Poetry:
