Cork to Host a Perfect Poetry Festival
Ireland’s largest annual festival dedicated to poetry, the 9th Cork International Poetry Festival will take place from March 24 - 28.
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s part of the diverse programme, over 60 poets will partake in readings, including emerging talents and well-established writers from around the globe. As well as in English, there will be readings in Catalan, Chinese, German, Irish and Lithuanian. Many events are free, and none cost more than €5 to attend. All participating venues, meanwhile, are within walking distance from one another. During the festival, there will be workshops for aspiring poets who want to hone their craft and shape their work into a more publishable form. There will also be manuscript consultation sessions, awards presentations and new publication launches. To mark the centenary of Romanian-born German language poet Paul Celan, there will be a special event honouring him at the 2020 festival. It will feature the presentation of the first book of the writer’s poetry translated into Irish. One of the distinctions of the Cork International Poetry Festival is that it has presented for the first time in Europe North American writers who would later go on to establish international reputations. Keeping up with this tradition, guests this year include Catherine Barnett, Rigoberto Gonzalez and Carmen Gimenez Smith. There will also be a strong showing by Irish and British poets. Writers scheduled to make an appearance in 2020 at the festival include Griffin Prize winner Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Forward Poetry Prize winner Jamie McKendrick and rising stars on the poetry scene Rachael Allen and Will Harris. This year for the first time, meanwhile, the event will see many young poets from Ireland’s recently established immigrant communities take part too. Another guest is Lithuanian poet Marius Burokas. The writer will present a reading of his poems in English translation to the general festival audience and a reading in his own language to the Cork Lithuanian community. 34
TRAVEL IRELAND MAGAZINE - MARCH 2020
The event has also commissioned some of the best poets writing in the Irish language to translate a selection of Marius’s work. The resulting dual-language chapbook will be distributed for free to the Lithuanian community in Ireland and to Irish language cafes and university departments. For more information on this year’s Cork International Poetry Festival, go to www.corkpoetryfest.net.
