2026 Highly Commended - Claire Dineen

Claire Dineen has once again had her excellent work recognised by the scholarship judging panel, a testament to her tenacity and talent. 

Claire is a young poet and writer based in Cork, Ireland whose work engages with the emotional textures of everyday life. She tends to approach storytelling as something inherently poetic, drawing on intertextual, religious or mythological material that she likes to unsettle or rework.

Her poetry has appeared in The Quarryman and in the anthology, This Is What It’s Like to Be in Love with Life. She was the winner of the 2019 Listowel Writers’ Week Young Writers Award and was invited to workshop with The Stinging Fly. She currently serves as Poetry Editor of The Quarryman and as Poetry Officer on University College Cork's Literature Society.

The judging panel described Claire's work as "Inventive, surprising, always entertaining, Claire Dineen’s forthright poetry asserts a bold new voice that is at once refreshing and questioning. It is visceral and ambitious work with real presence, trusting in the power of its own imagery and paring back explanations. The work is engaged by intertextuality and mythology, by the processes by which language makes meaning and how one might allow a space for the reader to bring this meaning to bear. In other words, Dineen is a sensitively attuned poet with an informed subversive streak, who will no doubt continue to fructify as an artist."

We publish part of Claire's submission here: