Congratulations to Tara Bergin, who has been announced as the winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2024!

Her winning collection, Savage Tales (Carcanet 2022) has been described by one of this year’s judges, poet Mark Roper, as 'utterly original, fiercely funny,
compulsively readable, very vulnerable and hugely enjoyable.'

'Among many strong collections submitted this year for the Michael Hartnett Award, it stood out clearly as the winner,' he said. 'It takes tremendous courage to present work in this way, in the refusal to allow anything inessential onto the page, thus leaving the greater part of every page empty.'

Speaking from her home in North East England where she is now based, Bergin said:

'Michael Hartnett said that the act of poetry was a rebel act. I agree. It makes for a strange sort of existence, often marked by doubt, uncertainty, solitude and failure. To receive this award feels like seeing a smoke signal go up from across the expanse. It says something like: keep going. That’s of immeasurable importance to any poet.'

'Poetry prizes are rare. Sometimes they bring as much disillusion as they do delight. I take encouragement from the fact that the Hartnett Award recognises a "third or subsequent collection". This seems to me a genuine acknowledgment and celebration of the longevity of a poet’s search for creative expression, and shows a real understanding of the mysterious and unpredictable route that can be a poet’s writing life.'

Bergin will be presented with the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award on the opening night of Éigse Michael Hartnett which takes place in Newcastle West, Co Limerick from October 3 to October 6. The award, which is valued at €8,000, is supported by the Irish Arts Council and by Limerick City and County Council and is presented, on alternate years to collections in English and Irish.

Find out more here.

Tara Bergin's third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin's book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.

Tara Bergin has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry), The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes) and Savage Tales (winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize).