All Ireland Scholars
Creative Writing Winners Announcement
The winners have been announced!
From a highly competitive shortlist, the judges selected three outstanding winners in each category. Congratulations to our deserving winners and to all those who took part in this year’s competition.
Poetry Winners
Calling Back by Ross Gallagher
First Prize
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.
Autumn by Laura Reynolds
Second Prize
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.
Prose Winners
Primordial Soup by Holly Langan
First Prize
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.
An Stad Deireanach by
Daniela Rana
Second Prize
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.
A Half Decent Bottle of Wine by Chris McGrillen
Third Prize
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.
Congratulations again to all entrants and thank you to everyone who took part in the 2026 competition!