TIPPERARY native Dean Browne has won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize for 2026.
The writer, who is based in Cork, won the award from Queen’s University Belfast for his debut poetry collection After Party.
“I was lucky enough to receive an encouraging letter from Seamus Heaney as a teenager in response to one I'd written him,” Browne said as he received his award at a ceremony held in Belfast's Crescent Arts Centre on June 22.
“The magnanimity of that gesture meant a lot to me then, for its kind perceptiveness and wisdom, and I'm extremely grateful to be recognised with this award for my first collection now — it is a very meaningful honour,” he added.
Pictured (l-r) at the awards ceremony, Professor Leontia Flynn, Professor Nick Laird, Dean Browne and Karen Solie (Pic: Queens Uni/Press Eye)The poet, who won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition in 2022, thanked the judges who selected his work for the prize.
“Thanks to my brilliant fellow nominees and to the judges at the Seamus Heaney Centre,” he said.
“That the three judges are poets I admire makes it all the more special,” he added.
“I guess the only thing to do now is let it go to my head.”
This judges for 2026 were Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird and Karen Solie.
Speaking of Browne’s work, Professor Laird said: “We liked the imagination in After Party, the sense of voice and surprise, the sensibility and variety of forms.
“We admired how the poems created a feeling of a perception of place in time triggered by a detail or idea, while attending to line, music, and structure, and how the poems, like spells, invoked weird parallel worlds. It's a worthy winner.’’
The Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize is awarded annually to a writer whose first full collection has been published in the preceding year, by a UK or Ireland-based publisher.
The winning writer receives £5k and is invited to participate in the Seamus Heaney Centre’s calendar of literary events.
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