Last Thursday, the 3rd of October, the School of English and Digital Humanities held its welcome event for the new academic year. This was an opportunity for the school to present their undergraduate awards and introduce their visiting writers: Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, John Banville; Writer-in-Residence, Danny Denton; and Frank O’Connor International Fellow in the Short Story, Sara Maitland. It was also the launch of Dr James O’Sullivan’s monograph; Towards a Digital Poetics (Palgrave, 2019).

Our scholarship winner, Rose Keating, was also honoured with a certificate for winning the Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship and performed her work "Guide to Hauntings".

It was a lovely opportunity to meet again with Rose, Lee and their colleagues in the School of English. We are grateful for their continuing support and dialogue with us on the development of the scholarship.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the second Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship is Rose Keating.  Rose has won multiple awards, such as the Sean Dunne Young Writers award and the Write Here, Write Now competition. She has been published in several journals, magazines and podcasts. Rose is also a spoken-word performer. ​

This year we had an even greater number of entries. These were shortlisted into a list of 19 applicants. This list was forwarded to the scholarship judge panel and this year's guest judge, Cónal Creedon, 

After some deliberation, the final shortlist was as follows:

1. Rose Keating (winner)
2. Molly Twomey (highly commended)
3. Kerri McIntyre and Kel Menton (highly commended)

We would like to thank again 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.

We look forward to reading and hearing the work Rose creates with the scholarship!

Thursday the 4th of October, we were delighted to be invited to the UCC School of English welcome event.

Our 2018 scholar, Ali Bracken Ziad, gave a brief reading. The event also detailed the various scholarship, awards and grant recipients through the last academic year and included some readings from recent publications. We also had the pleasure of chatting with the wonderful Cork writer, Cónal Creedon. Cónal relayed a story of a meeting he had with Eoin to us, it's always so lovely to hear new stories about Eoin and realise the many people who remember and think fondly of him.

We look forward to working with Lee Jenkins and the School of English again this year to organise the next scholarship award.

 We are delighted to announce that the winner of the inaugural Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship is 
Ali Bracken Ziad.  Ali is currently working on a debut chapbook.  He is a regular attendee of Ó Bhéal and is the current Munster Slam champion.  We greatly look forward to Ali's creative writing output over the coming months and years.

We had a wide range of impressive entries which were shortlisted into a list of five applicants. This list was forwarded to this year's judges - Bernard O'Donoghue, Thomas Morris, Leanne O'Sullivan and Ali Driscoll.

After some deliberation, the final shortlist was as follows:

1. Ali Bracken Ziad (winner)
2. Melanie Butler O’Reilly (second place)
3. Katherine Currey (highly commended)
4. Enoch Lampe (highly commended)
5. Peter English (highly commended)

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 heartening for us to be able to award this scholarship in Eoin's memory and we look forward to the body of work created due to it's patronage.

We would also like to take this opportunity to extend again our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to all of you who donated time, money and effort to supporting this scholarship.  We know Eoin would be proud that this was happening in his name and we thank all of you who have contributed in so many ways in making this idea a reality.