Many congratulations to Martina Evans, who has been shortlisted for the 2024 PEN Heaney Prize with The Coming Thing!

The £5000 prize, delivered as a partnership between English PEN, Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.

The inaugural prize is judged by poets Nick Laird, Paula Meehan and Shazea Quraishi. The three judges will be joined by Catherine Heaney, representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney, who will act as non-voting Chair of the judging panel.

The judging panel said of Evans' collection, 'In The Coming Thing Martina Evans offers a powerfully realised world — 1980s Cork — and an unforgettable narrator, Imelda, on a journey to England for an abortion. From the strictures of a Republic which denied Irish women bodily autonomy until constitutional change in 2018, Evans creates an Everywoman on the brink of the digital age.'

The winner of this year's PEN Heaney Prize will be announced on 2 December 2024 at a ceremony held at the Great Hall, Queen's University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's. The full shortlist, and tickets to the prize ceremony, can be found here.

Well done to Martina, and all the other shortlisted writers and publishers!

The Coming Thing is a brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evans's first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Tóibín. He says of her inimitable narrative style, 'Slowly, a poem that seems animated by random thoughts and images takes on a strange, concentrated power; the lines begin to feel like pure style, the narrative voice holding and wielding the hidden energies that Martina Evans consolidates, and then releases with such energy and confidence and verve.'

Imelda, the book's central character, is immersed in challenging new worlds where old customs still somehow survive. It is the 1980s and the poem takes shape among punks in Cork City. The 'coming thing' refers to the arrival of computers which were taking hold and beginning to effect their transformations of data and then of lives; but ultimately the title identifies the abortion which Imelda will have in a Brixton clinic.

Imelda, who Evans's regular readers will recall from her earlier narrative Petrol (2012), narrates the story with a light touch, even when the book's preoccupation with abortion, suicide and euthanasia provides a strong and compelling undertow. The Coming Thing looks hard at the duplicity surrounding received ideas about the sacredness of human life and how economic change runs counter to the values of 'old' Ireland.