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.

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.