On the 25th of October we attended the annual School of English welcome event. As always it was a lovely evening in the very cosy and welcoming staff common room in UCC. It was another opportunity for us to meet Freyja (pictured here) and her mother. Freyja read some new work we hadn't heard which was a real treat. It was also great to see Danny Denton (also pictured above) and catch up over the past few months. Danny is a writer and lecturer in UCC. He has provided great support to the scholarship and is instrumental every year in making sure it continues to happen. 

​Thank you again to UCC for the invite. This years Scholarship application process will open soon and as always we look forward to the high calibre of submissions. 

On the On August 30th we gathered together again in The Spailpín Fánach to remember Eoin and to celebrate this years Scholar and highly commended Poets, and those from previous years.

It was really lovely meet Freya and Otto in person, both of whom gave beautiful readings of their recent work.

We were also delighted to be joined by previous scholars, Aoife Osborne, who performed some of her new work, and Alana Daly Mulligan, who treated us to a screening of their short film Homofónia.

As always, Eoin's friends treated us to a great night of music, with performances from (in no particular order!) M'Adam, Rob Carlile, John Treacy, Sadhbh Moriarty, Aengus Mac a Bháird, Annie Bloch, Lauren Cahalane, Muireann Joyce-Hearn, Katie O' Neill, Nikki Burke, Eamonn Mulholland, The Duffys, Jack Hickey, Sound Addiction and Mark Leonard.

A special thanks to Tom Duffy for doing the sound on the night and Danilo Milk for doing a live stream - a first for the Tribute Night and a huge benefit for those who couldn't make it, but wanted to take part in some way.

Thanks as always for all of the love and support and it is so encouraging to see the community of poets grow every year.

After reviewing the many talented applications, the final shortlist was as follows:

1. Freyja Hellebust (winner)
2. Otto Goodwin (highly commended)

It gives us great pleasure to see the Scholarship community widen further with the addition of Freyja and Otto, and we look forward to meeting them at the Tribute Night later in the summer.

As always, we would like to thank all students who took part. It is very heartening to see the scholarship go from strength to strength each year.

We attended the first in-person School of English and Digital Humanities welcome event since 2019, last Tuesday 18th of October. It was really lovely to get together in person again. We were happy to meet the new head of School, Claire Connolly and the new School manager, Aisling O' Leary. It was, as always, great to catch up with Danny Denton again.

It was also a lovely opportunity to chat again with Aoife, hear about the progress on her MA in Belfast and hear her read her wonderful work again.

We will shortly be opening this years Scholarship application process and look forward to all the great work we're sure will be submitted. 

This year we were finally able to gather in person again to celebrate Eoin's tribute night. The event took place in the Spailpín Fánach on the first of September. As always, the room was full of love, creativity and friendship, just the way he would have wanted it to be. Thanks as always to Eoin's close friends in organising and performing on the night. It was really lovely as well to see poets from past years coming back with their family and friends to perform and support. One of our ambitions with the scholarship was to create a supportive community of writers in Cork, and we really saw that coming to fruition this year. It was also as always a lovely opportunity to catch up with each other and a remember Eoin together. 

You can see the full playlist here. 

Eoin's very talented friend, Annie Bloch, recently released the official music video for her song; "The Saint".

​Annie has written a number of songs about Eoin, her relationship with him and her processing of her grief at his passing. She was a very close friend of Eoin's and we are always so happy to spend time with her when we can and to enjoy the music she creates and shares with us.

We are delighted to announce the winner of the fifth Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship, Aoife Obsorne. As part of the scholarship, Aoife will receive €1500 to allow her to focus on developing her writing over the summer. We hope to have our annual tribute night in-person again this year, and look forward to Aoife's performance. Aoife will also receive mentorship from the UCC writer-in-residence. You can follow Aoife's progress over the summer from her instagram page, @little.lost.starfish

Aoife has published numerous articles with local and national newspapers. Her most recent venture into literary criticism saw her write for the Paper Lanterns Young Adult Literary Journal. In 2016, Aoife placed second in her category at the National Newspapers of Ireland Press Pass Awards. She was also shortlisted for the International IMBAS Short Story Competition in 2018 and was a highly commended entrant of the 2020 NYC Midnight Microfiction Competition. We greatly look forward to reading her future work.

After reviewing the many talented applications, the final shortlist was as follows:

1. Aoife Osborne (winner)
2. Emily Linehan (highly commended)

We are delighted to welcome Aoife and Emily to the community of poets and writers that is growing around the scholarship. We hope to see them both, any many of our past scholars and runners-up, at the tribute night later in the year. We thank all students who took the time to enter the scholarship and encourage those of you who did not succeed this year to enter again next year. 

After a very strange year and a bit, and having missed the 2020 tribute night, we held on online Zoom tribute on the 11th of September. As usual, a great effort was made by Eoin's closest friends to create a night of poetry and music. We were joined by our scholar for 2021, Maeve Joy Taggart, and our scholar for 2020, Alana Daly Mulligan. Many of Eoin's talented friends performed both covers and original songs and it was really great to see them all again. 

Though we may have had reservations about yet another Zoom get-together, this one was really special. The atmosphere of love and creativity that is so palpable on all tribute nights managed to come through. Having said that, we are very excited to get together in person next year, le cúnamh Dé!

We were, of course, beset by some technological issues. The various videos have plenty of moments of audio and/or video freeze. We still felt it was worthwhile to share them, You can access the full playlist here. 

Tarren Amor and Alisdair McDermid-Smith recently completed Ironman Finland in support of the Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship and the Safe and Sound Organisation. A huge achievement and we were touched and honoured that Taz and Ali choose to use the event to fundraise for Eoin's scholarship. They donated €2950, pretty much covering two full years of the scholarship! The event happened to fall on the 6th anniversary of Eoin's passing and it is incredible to think of the feats the two lads achieved on that day in Finland this year! We hope to welcome both of them in Cork at some stage, but for now are just very grateful from afar.

This backstory is taken from Taz and Ali's facebook -
​​This year our aspirations have aligned and we find ourselves on the journey towards our first Ironman. As if 2020 wasn't challenging enough, we thought training for and completing an Ironman in 2021 whilst navigating life at sea should add a little extra spice.

We became great friends 5 years back meeting through the yachting industry and a shared passion for surfing and 'kiting'. For the past 3 years, we have been lucky enough to work on the same watersports-orientated vessel and continue to raise each other's standards in and out of the water. This lifestyle keeps us fit and healthy, but this year the desire to push our physical and mental limits calls us into one of the greatest endurance challenges going. By no means are we triathletes, but we are physically able and hungry to prove our potential as both individuals and friends.

There will, of course, be some hurdles along our journey within this global pandemic. As we've already seen there are no guarantees with travel or event planning these days, but this will not stop us from pushing ourselves for good cause. We will endeavor to complete the Ironman in Tahko, Finland on August 14th, but if for any reason this does not go ahead we will complete the next available event or just do it on our own.

We will tackle this path of chosen hardship over the next 6 months with the aim to raise money and awareness for those whom are not lucky enough to make such choices.

We are completing this event to raise money for two amazing charities:
The Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship
Safe and Sound Organisation 

Our warmest congratulations to Maeve Jane Taggart, the winner of the fourth Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship. To date, Maeve's creative writing projects have been largely poetry based, with poems collected on the Instagram account @maevejmct. Creative non-fiction writing has lead to the piece 'Sugar-Pilled Love' being shortlisted for the Wow! Women in Writing 2019 Creative Non-Fiction competition and the piece 'A 'Brief' Update on Cork's Attitude to Sexual Assault' being shortlisted for the 'I'll Show You Mine' journals 2019 prize in non-fiction. Creative writing work has been published in two volumes of The Quarryman, Motley Magazine and The Cherry Revolution. Non-fiction and news have been published in The University Express, Shared Future News, Motley and SpunOut.ie. Maeve will be mentored by this years' UCC writer in residence; Eimear Ryan and we look forward to reading her new work.​

After reviewing the many talented applications, the final shortlist was as follows:

1. Maeve Jane Taggart (winner)
2. Dara Hanley (highly commended)
3. Ianna Rosa Román (highly commended)

As always, we would like to thank all students who took the time to enter the scholarship and encourage those of you who did not succeed this year to enter again next year.  It is exciting to see interest and applications to the scholarship growing. It is also wonderful to be growing this catalogue of emerging writers.