Festival

23 & 24 April 2026

Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann and The James Joyce Centre were pleased to present three events in commemoration of Eavan Boland. Taking place across Friday 24th and Saturday 25th April, this special programme of events celebrated the life and enduring legacy of one of Ireland’s foremost poets, Eavan Boland, on the sixth anniversary of her passing.

Poetry Reading with Jane Hirshfield and Paula Meehan

Friday, 24th April at 6.30pm

We welcomed Jane Hirshfield and Paula Meehan for an evening of poetry, marking the opening of the inaugural Eavan Boland Weekend.

This opening event brought together two extraordinary voices in contemporary poetry. Jane Hirshfield, award-winning essayist, poet, and translator, and Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets, read from their own work, and reflected on Eavan Boland’s legacy and contribution to Irish poetry.

Poetry Masterclass with Jane Hirshfield

Saturday, 25th April at 12pm

This one-hour master class looked at the question of questions in poetry in several dimensions: how almost any lyric poem can be understood as the response to a question — whether or not that question is explicitly given — but also some ways that acts of interrogation can open a poem to unexpected expansions and directions, admit uncertainty, or allow a poem to say things that might not be otherwise sayable. The session included at least one generative experiment, perhaps two–please bring notebook and pen or some other way to write.

Eavan Boland Awardee Celebration

Saturday, 25th April at 6.30pm

This reading featured each of our awardees reading from their forthcoming collections alongside some work by Eavan Boland with our mentors discussing the impact and connection of Eavan Boland’s work.

Alvy Carragher

Alvy Carragher is based in Dublin. She grew up in Galway and Tipperary and has lived in Louisiana, South Korea, and Canada. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently What Remains the Same (The Gallery Press, 2024), shortlisted for the Farmgate National Poetry Award. She was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Eavan Boland Award (2025–2026) and has received the Irish Arts Council’s Literature Bursary Award (2022 and 2024). She is currently working on a fourth poetry collection and a book of short stories.

Ali Choudhary

Originally from Ireland, Ali Choudhary is a writer and artist. He is the recipient of the Eavan Boland Award by Poetry Ireland, among other honours, including being selected as a finalist for The Adroit Prize for Poetry and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Ali’s poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Protean Magazine, Shenandoah, and others.

Dr. Rachael Hegarty

Dr. Rachael Hegarty is a Dubliner, poet, educator and broadcaster. Her poetry collections have won awards and critical acclaim. Her fifth collection, Saints Alive – a Kinda Novena, launches in 2026. She’s been published in PIR, Cyphers, the Irish Times, Banshee and International Poetry Anthologies. Her kids say she, still, uses the F words too much; Finglas, Feminism and Feckin’ Poetry!

John McAuliffe

John McAuliffe has published seven books with The Gallery Press, including National Theatre, which was an Observer and Irish Times ‘Book of the Year’ in 2024, The Kabul Olympics, which was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Month in June 2020 and a TLS and Irish Times 2020 Book of the Year, and The Way In (2015), which won the Michael Hartnett Award for Best Irish Collection that year. His Selected Poems was published in the US by Wake Forest in 2024. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, where is also the University’s AVP for Culture. John is also Associate Publisher at Carcanet Press, which published Eavan Boland’s work for many decades, and where he has recently worked on Mist Becoming Rain: Selected Poems of Austin Clarke (June 26).

Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann is proudly funded by The Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and through The Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery Funding. The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.