6th Annual Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry

For the sixth year, Glucksman Ireland House will welcome the winner of one of the poetry world’s most coveted prizes, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection as judged by a select committee at Queens University Belfast. The winner, Adam Crothers, will read from his collection Several Deer at the annual Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry. Crothers will be introduced by Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird. Laird is curating Irish Arts Center’s PoetryFest, at which Crothers will also read on FridayNovember 3

Seamus Heaney himself inaugurated the first Tom Quinlan lecture in 2011 at Glucksman Ireland House to endorse the importance of the first published book of poetry in a poet’s literary life. The lecture series, established by the Quinlan family, is named for Tom Quinlan in honor of his nearly 70 years as a poetry teacher and scholar. Quinlan, a member of Glucksman Ireland House since 1997, also reads at this event.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His first collection, Several Deer, was published by Carcanet in 2016, and won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. He has appeared in the anthologies New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff, 2016), and in 2016 he was selected as one of Poetry Ireland Review‘s ‘Rising Generation’ poets.