All Ireland Scholars Creative Writing Awards Ceremony
The winners of the 2026 All Ireland Scholars Creative Writing Competition were honoured at the annual Creative Writing Awards Ceremony in Adare Manor on the 28th April.
Sponsored by JP McManus, the competition, now in its sixth year, is open to recipients of the All Ireland Scholarship, from 2008 to present. This year’s competition focused on the short form written word (max 600 words) with prose and poetry categories with entrants asked to focus on short-form fiction, non-fiction, and op-ed.
This year’s stellar judging panel included Paul Lynch (Booker Prize Winner 2023), Donal Ryan (Orwell Prize Winner 2025), and Dr Emily Cullen. The judging process was chaired by Professor Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Head of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.
Commenting on the competition, Sponsor JP McManus said: “I am delighted to be here today to honour the winners of this year’s All Ireland Scholars Creative Writing Competition. With over 2,050 All Ireland Scholars across the island of Ireland, their written work is yet another reminder of the creativity, insight, and imagination they bring to the table. We take great pride in following our scholars after they finish university. Congratulations to all of our winners here today and many thanks to the judges for sharing their time and valuable expertise.”
Winners
Poetry Category
First Prize – Calling Back by Ross Gallagher
“This is a tender, richly evocative poem. Capturing the speaker’s close relationship to their granddad, through the gesture of a hug, and vividly conjuring the domestic setting of his cosy home, the poem also chimes with melodic half-rhymes and internal rhymes. Calling back is heartfelt and full of affection, memory and love, delivered with real perceptiveness and anchored with authentic detail.”
Second Prize – Autumn by Laura Reynolds
“This big-hearted poem is suffused with vibrant life and with the lyric epiphany of a poet who calls our attention to the beauty of dying nature and the miracle of the wheeling seasons. The speaker’s energy and gratitude, ‘like second date butterflies’ is truly infectious.”
Third Prize – After The Last Box by Grace Carthy
“This graceful, formally accomplished poem evokes a moment of flux in an emptied room in lines that conjure a state of liminality without sentimentality.”
Prose Category
First Prize – Primordial Soup by Holly Langan
“A late August day by the sea becomes something rich and transcendental as a group of schoolgirls momentarily dissolve in the water before emerging renewed, leaving the reader with the precise feeling of summer-holiday release. The writing is tactile and vivid, its sensory detail capturing the heat, salt, and textures of the shore with great immediacy and fidelity.”
Second Prize – An Stad Deireanach by Daniela Rana
“A train journey towards Dublin becomes a passage through life, with the narrator moving from childhood innocence into youth and adulthood. The piece is playful yet poignant, effortlessly compressing a lifetime into a single journey while reflecting on the parts of ourselves that we lose to time.”
Third Prize -A Half Decent Bottle of Wine by Chris McGrillen
“A narrator encounters a flowered memorial for a young woman killed in a traffic accident and soon finds himself buying roses to place beside dying lilies. The story is economical yet evocative and opens the reader to reflections on life and death, the rituals of public grief, and how quickly the living move on.”