Ellen Ní Chonchúir - Winner of the 2025 Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship

​We are once again so happy to announce this year's Scholar and highly commended applicants to the Eoin Murray Memorial Scholarship. 

Our scholar for 2025 is..... Ellen Ní Chonchúir! Ellen is an English and history student at UCC. Poetry was her first love, but she also enjoys experimenting with short fiction, playwriting and essays. We very much look forward to seeing what this award supports Ellen in creating.

As always, the standard of entries was very competitive and Ellen's entry was deemed outstanding. John Fitzgerald, Sadhbh Moriarty and Ellen Dillon headed this year's judgement panel, and they had this to say about Ellen's work:

“A remarkably self-assured writer, with impressive range and depth to her poetry and prose, resulting in deeply personal yet universal meditations on life and living. "Goodbye blue Monday" finds glimpses of strange beauty in everyday gestures and moments. "Spring" deploys rhyming couplets with a deft lightness that breathes life into well-worn forms and tropes. In general, the writing is alive with excitement and surprise, generated by careful and bold use of language and fired by an impressive, informed imagination. It is also beautifully introspective, with rich and evocative imagery underscored by dreamlike detachment.”

There was 26 applicants and we had two highly-commended writers who were recognised for their excellent submissions:

• Aoife Imray
• Claire Dineen

The annual tribute night is set to take place on the 4th of September this year. It is 10 years since Eoin's passing and we have a few ideas on how to mark this anniversary, which we will post here in due course.