The Student Award of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust is an initiative encouraging the writing of poetry within the three universities that support the Trust. This year's winners are: Eoghan Totten (QUB), Elizabeth Oxley (TCD), Kate Lawlor (UCD), Viviana Fiorentino (QUB), Judy O'Kane (QUB) and Noah Racey (TCD). Each student is awarded a prize of €1,000.

In this week's Poetry Programme, three of the winners – Eoghan Totten, Elizabeth Oxley and Judy O'Kane – join presenter Olivia O'Leary in studio, and we hear readings of work by two other winners, Viviana Fiorentino and Kate Lawlor.

Eoghan Totten is currently reading for an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, as a Michael Longley scholar. His poems have appeared in Local Wonders (Dedalus Press), The Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, The Apiary, Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus Press), and more. He holds a PhD in Earth Sciences and trains for the marathon in his spare time.
Originally from the US, Elizabeth Oxley is a Dublin-based writer and a student in the MPhil in Creative Writing program at Trinity College Dublin. Her poems and prose have appeared in magazines and journals such as The Poetry Review, Frontier, The Banyan Review, Peregrine, Ruminate, and Crosswinds. Her first poetry collection, After April Rain, was published in 2021 by Longship Press in San Rafael, California.

Judy O’Kane is a poet and prose writer living in Dublin. Her poetry has been published in the Irish Times, North, Landfall, The Manchester Review and The World of Fine Wine. She has won the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the National Memory Day Prize, the Irish Post Prize, and the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. She holds a Creative/Critical PhD in creative non fiction from the University of East Anglia. She is currently reading for the MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB where she is exploring place in the work of Heaney.

Photo: Elizabeth Oxley, Eoghan Totten, Judy O’Kane, Olivia O'Leary