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Finding your Voice

DCU Library’s Creative Writing Competition Awards Evening

The 17th annual award ceremony for the DCU Library Creative Writing Competition took place on Thursday 19th May. 

This year’s winning entry went to Michael Donnelly for his poem ‘Silently’. The award was presented to the winner by Anna Heussaff, a Dublin author who writes in both English and Irish. Anna spoke about how good poetry and prose will always shine a light on change.  This sentiment was captured perfectly in Michael’s winning entry, a poem which opens with tension, weaving through anger and confusion only to leave us with a growing sense of hope.  

Commendations were awarded on the night to Margaret Kelly, Annette Rogers, Joseph Deegan, Mary Walsh, Jimmy Conway, Martin Donnery, Emmet O’Reilly and Sandra Jackson and Michael Stafford.

Anna warmly congratulated all the awardees and complimented them on ‘finding their voice’, be it a fun voice or a poetic voice. ‘The thrill of writing is that you can write from a voice you might not use every day,’ she told them, going on to highlight that writing something funny is really hard because it’s difficult to maintain the humour. But many of the winning stories achieved this demanding trait.

Before reading from her crime novel Deadly Intent and also a YA novel Hóng, Anna spoke of her own experiences working with homeless men in London, mentioning one quote which has stayed with her some years later. “We can never accept the impossibility of change,” she said before leaving us with the her own understanding of how words can save us, comfort us and make our lives all the more richer.