2026 Scholar - Valentine Jones

We are once again so happy to announce this year's scholar - Valentine Jones. 

Valentine is a writer and poet from Limerick. Places they have been published include Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, The Wild Umbrella, Iris Breac, the From the Well anthology, and the upcoming 21st issue of Skylight 47. In 2025 Valentine performed at the Cork International Short Story Festival, and is set to perform at the 2026 Cork International Poetry Festival as part of the Prebooked Poetry Introductions. They are in their first year in UCC, studying English and Gaeilge. They have received the Edna O’Brien Young Writers Award and the Sr. Joan Bowles Youth Award. They are a Quercus Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship student at UCC.

The judging panel described Jones' work as follows - "'Shuddersheen colour, dampening to / mudlife brown'... Valentine Jones is a precociously talented stylist, whose work is saturated with vivid, often surreal, imagery and anchored in concrete detail, creating image-rich poetry that sticks with you long after it's been read. The poetry bends and plays with reality in ways that are inquisitive, philosophical, full of unexpected images - and, to boot, a pleasure to read. This is exciting and unusually mature work, poems that stand out for their originality of voice and imagination, their mix of reflection and observation — all of which creates a new and entire world within each one. This is a young poet in their seedtime who is fully deserving of the support and recognition of the EM Scholarship. "

We publish a poem from Valentine's submission below:

SCIENCE CLASS, 2019
I can tell you honestly
the trees aren't real
the birds don't sing
and the sun can't rise.
It's all just
kamikaze neurons in your skull
flaring briefly
burning themselves out.
What exists beyond the bounds
of trembling sight and sound
isn't real. The trees exist
only in your eyes.
The birds sing a concert
to an audience of one.
And the sun settling on your skin
is close enough to touch.
There is no space between planets.
If on a clear night you stood outside
balanced on a chair and reached out
you could grab a star
and pull it gently down to earth.