This year’s Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Awards Ceremony will feature a new award – the Francis Harvey Award for Poetry. This annual award has been created to highlight the life and legacy of Donegal poet Francis Harvey, 1925-2014. The winner of the 2023 Allingham Poetry Competition will also be declared the winner of the Francis Harvey Award.
If you're not familiar with Francis Harvey, look into his Collected Poems. In her introduction, Moya Cannon writes that ‘...Francis Harvey’s work combines the passion for precision of a naturalist and the yearning for grace of a poet, except for the fact that a passion for precision, for naming, is also part of the bedrock of poetry. In [his] poems there is a vivid sense of how we are all moving, “free but tethered, through time’s inexorable weathers.”’
As in past years, the winner of the Allingham Flash Fiction Competition will also be declared the winner of the Keane Family Award, honouring the memory of Ballyshannon writer and arts patron James Keane.
Competition rules and entry forms for the 2023 Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions are now available and the competitions are open for entries through 22 September.
The 2023 Allingham Festival will take place on 8-12 November. Hope to see you at the Festival, and perhaps at the Awards Ceremony...
Tom Sigafoos, Event Manager,
2023 Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions
A favourite Francis Harvey poem:
“Sculptors” (In memory of Con O’Mullane)
It sits on my desk being nothing but what
I know it to be: a perfection of form.
The stone that we found washed up on the shore
at Enniscrone more than fifty years ago.
Smooth as flesh stretched over bone and shaped
so sensuously by the sea I can’t keep
my hands off it each time it catches my eye.
Like that Brancusi we saw in London once
and kept on wanting to touch and touch and touch.
(Francis Harvey, Collected Poems, Dedalus Press 2007, ISBN 978 1 904556 68 8)