SOURCE: IRISH TIMES

Gail McConnell has won the 2022 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, wirth €10,000, for The Sun is Open at an award ceremony in Trinity College Dublin this week.

Her debut collection, published last year by Penned in the Margins, focuses on the life and death of the poet’s father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult perspectives, the collection of poetry pieces together his history and life.

McConnell said: “I am deeply honoured to be the fourth recipient of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize for The Sun is Open. This book swirls around an autobiographical event: my father’s murder by the IRA outside our Belfast home in 1984. Using newspaper reports, Hansard, fragments of the Psalms, my father’s student diaries and other public and private materials archived in a ‘dad box’, it moves between child and adult voices to try to piece together a history and a life. I started my career as a critic of Irish poetry and swerved into writing poems as I approached the age at which my father died. It means a great deal to me to be awarded an Irish prize, judged by writers and critics whose work addresses the complexities of this place – this place where, as Louis MacNeice put it, ‘history never dies’ and where one hopes to find what Yeats called ‘a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter’.

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