Pigott Poetry Prize 2025

We are delighted to announce that the winner of this year’s Pigott Poetry Prize goes to Kerrie Hardie with her book We Go On.
Pigott Poetry Prize Winner
Sponsor: Mark Pigott KBE & Family
Winner: We Go On by Kerrie Hardie
Publisher: Bloodaxe

Huge congratulations to Kerrie!

The Shortlist

Ireland’s most valuable poetry award celebrates three remarkable collections

 

Listowel Writers’ Week is delighted to reveal the shortlist for the 2025 Pigott Poetry Prize, Ireland’s largest monetary prize for a poetry collection. The winner will receive €12,000, with €1,000 awarded to each of the two finalists

 

Photo Credit: Miriam Slemon

Now in its twelfth year, the Pigott Poetry Prize continues to highlight the extraordinary talent shaping contemporary Irish poetry.

The three shortlisted collections for 2025 are:

  • David McLoghlin – Crash Centre (Salmon Poetry)
  • Kerry Hardie – We Go On (Bloodaxe Books)
  • Mary O’Malley – The Shark Nursery (Carcanet Poetry)

Selected from a strong field of submissions, this year’s shortlist was chosen by renowned poets Moya Cannon and Peter Sirr, who praised the richness and emotional depth of the entries.

The winner will be announced on Wednesday, 28th May 2025, at the festival opening night event in the Listowel Arms Hotel. The Pigott Poetry Prize continues to champion poetic excellence, supporting poets and sharing their voices with audiences across Ireland and beyond.

Reflecting on the significance of the prize, sponsor Mark Pigott KBE shared, “It is a joy and a privilege to support the Pigott Poetry Prize and to honour the creative spirit of Irish poetry. I would like to thank Moya Cannon and Peter Sirr for their thoughtful adjudication and to congratulate David, Kerry and Mary on this well-deserved recognition. Their work exemplifies the strength, beauty and importance of the poetic voice todays world.”

Ned O’Sullivan, Chairman on the Board of Listowel Writers’ Week, added,  “We are deeply grateful to all the poets who submitted their work for this year’s competition and to Mark Pigott KBE for his ongoing, generous support. Our congratulations go to the three shortlisted poets whose words inspire, challenge, and uplift us.”

This Listowel Literary Festival upcoming programme is the result of a collaboration between three leading local cultural institutions, Listowel Writers’ Week, Kerry Writers’ Museum and St. John’s Theatre and Arts Centre.

By Poet, Mary O'Malley

The Shark Nursery

Carcanet Poetry

The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems’ world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf’s touch to the rat’s tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O’Malley’s animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils. In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia.

By Poet, Kerry Hardie

We Go On

Bloodaxe Books

This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy. Its title holds an echo of Beckett: ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (from his novel ‘The Unnameable’), and holds something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’. Her work, as Claire Askew has noted, is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’. It recognises that all localness is part of humanness; that the dominance of one sort of humanness to the exclusion of another sort diminishes all humanness, representing both loss and the degradation of the whole.   

By Poet, David McLoghlin

Crash Centre

Salmon Poetry

With unusual, memoir-like power, Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery. Employing impactful, direct address at key moments, the poems also use fairytale imagery and resonant poetic closure. Where Crash Centre begins as self-witness, to reclaim a younger self from silence, by the end it breaks through to a lost community, speaking to, and for, others.