The judges for this year's Allingham Fiction and Poetry competitions are poet Moya Cannon and novelist Paul Lynch. There is still time to enter both competitions as the deadline is September 9th for postal entries and midnight September 11th for online entries. The prize in each category is €300. For more information, visit www.allinghamfestival.com/fiction-poetry-competitions.
Moya Cannon will judge this year's Allingham Poetry Competition. Moya is the author of five collections of poems, the most recent being Keats Lives (2015, Carcanet Press, Manchester). She was born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, spent most of her adult life in Galway and now lives in Dublin. She studied History and Politics at University College, Dublin, and International Relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Her work sings of deep connections— the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us a human, a web of interdependences that sustain the ‘gratuitous beauty’ of the planet. A winner of the Brendan Behan and Lawrence O Shaughnessy awards, she has edited Poetry Ireland Review and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her Collected Poems will be published by Carcanet Press in 2018.
Paul Lynch is this year's Allingham Flash Fiction Competition judge. Paul is the prize-winning author of GRACE, THE BLACK SNOW and RED SKY IN MORNING. He won the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He won the Prix des Lecteurs Privat, and was nominated for France’s Prix Femina, the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize) and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize), as well as being shortlisted at Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year. In the US, both his novels were Amazon.com books of the month and he was selected by Barnes and Noble for the Discover Great New Writers series. Paul was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Co. Donegal, and lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, when the newspaper folded. He has written for many Irish newspapers and has written regularly for The Sunday Times on film.
