CURRACLOE POET RUTH IS WINNER OF KAVANAGH AWARD
THE CURRACLOE-based poet Ruth Timmins is the winner of this year’s Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award for an unpublished collection of poems entitled ‘ The Hour Angles’.
The judge Brian Lynch, who is standing down as president of the Patrick Kavanagh Society, said that of all the winners of the award since he took up office in 2009, Ms Timmins, pictured left, is perhaps the most challenging.
‘ The originality of her way of looking at the world requires the reader to work hard at her meanings but the freshness of her vision and her considerable powers of descripion rewards close attention,’ he said.
‘How her talent develops over the years, will, I hope prove yet again the value of the Kavanagh Award as a vital step in the careers of Ireland’s most exciting new poets’, he added.
Ruth Timmins was born in Dublin in 1974 and went to school in Wexford after her family moved to the county. She returned to the city in the 1990s, and for 13 years she worked as a journalist for various publications.
She has been writing poetry since she was a young girl and now writes full time at her cottage in Curracloe where she lives with her eight-year-old son. She is as yet unpublished.
This is the first year that the €1,000 prize has been sponsored by the Institute of Education.
The Patrick Kavanagh Festival in County Monaghan at which the award was announced was attended by the Minister for Arts and Culture Heather Humphreys who congratulated Ruth on her success.
Ruth’s poem Navvy Mare can be read on this page.