First Prize - €1000

Second Prize - €250

Third Prize - €100

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Competition Rules

• Entries may be in either English or Irish

• There is no set theme

• Entry is online only via this Google form

• Closing date for entries: midnight Friday 29 September 2023

• The entry fee is: €10 for up to three poems. Payments will be done on Paypal, there is a link in the form. 

• The winners of the competition will receive the following prizes: 1st Prize: €1000, 2nd Prize: €250 + 3rd Prize: €100

• All poems will be judged anonymously. Poems will be disqualified if they show any name, address or other identifying mark. All details on entry form only as requested.

• Please only include the Title of poem and poem in the PDF submission in the form.

• Poems should be single spaced in 12 point Times New Roman font (or similar)

• Maximum length 40 lines (excluding title and stanza breaks)

• You may enter as often as you like provided poems are accompanied by the appropriate fee. 

• The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into regarding individual competition entries

• Poems cannot be altered or changed once they have been entered

• Poems must be the original work of the entrant. Entries must not have been previously published or self-published, in print or online, nor have won a prize in another competition. 

• Copyright remains with the author, however Westival reserves the right to publish winning and shortlisted poems on its website and/or in print.

• Winners will be announced at an event during the festival. Winners will be invited to read at the awards event. Shortlisted entrants only will be notified.

• Best of luck in the competition! 

If you have any questions about the rules of the competition please email Cat at catherine@westival.ie

If you have any questions about payment please email Trish on accounts@westival.ie

Ready To Submit Your Entry?

2023 Judges

Ger Reidy has won several national poetry prizes and has received an Arts Council bursary. He is the author of Pictures from a Reservation and Drifting Under The Moon. Poetry Ireland, referring to Reidy's poems comment  "that they have Kavanagh like realism and eye for the particular.... his poems echo the grounded concision of Larkin". Ger’s latest book Before Rain was shortlisted for the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers Festival. His first collection of short stories Jobs for a Wet Day was published in 2015 and was nominated for the prestigious Edge Hill Prize.

Nuala O’Connor 

Nuala O’Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1970, and divides her time between Counties Galway and Leitrim. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in the Irish language and from Dublin City University with an MA in Translation Studies.

PREVIOUS WINNERS 2020

Many congratulations to 2020's winners and highly commended poets, gratitude to all entrants who trusted us with their words, and huge thanks as ever to the wonderfully generous adjudicators Ger Reidy, Geraldine Mitchell and John McAuliffe, for their time and thoughtful consideration of each of the many entries to the competition this year.

The three winning poets are listed here in order:

FIRST PRIZE - WINNING POEM

Asking Crow - Cathy Ryan

i
The day breaks clean
as the flaming sun rises
over the blue lip of the sea
I walk the roads every morning now.
In the quiet I can taste
the breath of the Earth;
primrose banks wealthy
in yellow
the hulk of a buzzard cresting
a pole - sailor on the lookout for life.
The milky light of morning
peels open the day
and it’s Crow who stops
me, his cry
close to words.
What are you saying?
You fly, beading the land
with your shiny black eyes.
What do you see?

ii
The Crow is dead.
Stygian pitch on top
of the old stone wall
perfectly dropped
perfectly whole
perfectly still.
Across the grass, a set of
clothes dry in the wind
dancing like ghosts
jerking
slapping
looking for
a body to wear.
I bend closer to Crow.
His eye holds the sun
an inkwell of light
tail feathers spread
five fingers of wing
Hold steady for death
It’s part of the dance.

SECOND PRIZE

come on so - Maresa Sheehan

Belted in and sitting high
on the booster seat
in the front of the van,
off to see Jim Coburn
about a greyhound,
with the car freshner trees
swaying and faded,
barely denting the smell
of dogs and shredded paper.

Parked up skeoways
outside The Little Shop,
they lick, suck
and crack
ice cream cones
with baby and false teeth.
It's not the day
for saying a treat only
on Sundays,
the worst thing
good men do
with small boys.

THIRD PRIZE

Cold Tea - Lynda Tavakoli

In the good room of our small bungalow,
mum read tea leaves from china cups
rescued from the Oxfam shop,
her slight frame and unassuming manner
a mere subterfuge for her divining skills.

There were rules - never on a Sunday
and never in the company of my aunt.
I don’t expect our dad much approved either,
but he let it go, understanding that some things
are probably best left undisturbed.

Believers came to swallow readings
with the trust of any never on the Sabbath
congregation and sculpted dregs of faith
round porcelain curves. Prophesies of doom
were subtly laid aside for Sunday sermons.

I sometimes wonder if she’d seen her future
buried in the leaves. An arrow (never good news),
snakes (the same), or wavy lines portending
journeys unfulfilled. But if she did, it was for none
of us to know, for that was not our mother’s way.

Looking back, I should have read the signs myself -
cups of tea, half drunk and cold, perched
on the bird table or teetering on bathroom shelves
and once or twice abandoned by our father’s garden tools -
that sedge of herons she had planted by the pond.

It’s the way I like to drink it, she would say, the dare
in her eyes always enough, and later,
tea leaves carefully strained, I would present to her
a sun, a fish, a flying bird and catch her smile,
cupped in her hands the white lie of a daughter’s love.

HIGHLY COMMENDED POEMS

Dog Days - Brian Kirk

Summer came scampering into the house
this year, uncalled for, dragging garden
smells on muddy paws and a new silence
coloured by a yellow, ever-present sun
that threatened but never delivered storms.
On humid nights you were visited in dreams

by memories of failure, the unfulfilled dreams
of your youth. You cowered while the house
held its breath in expectation of a storm
that never came. Something stirred in the garden;
Orion’s dog slept under a shade in the sun,
tongue lolling, his breath breaking the silence,

laboured, hoarse, excavating the silence
of your mind, making room for more dreams,
vague anxieties fostered under a glaring sun.
You grew accustomed to being prisoner in your house,
the known world extended to the bottom of the garden,
no further, but the TV brought you closer to the sturm

und drang of peoples tearing each other apart. Storms
in teacups to you who measured out each day in silence.
Heat spilled out the open windows into the garden,
searing the grass, choking flowers while you dozed, dreaming
of disease, death and decay consuming the house.
Outside it was worse, speared under a burning sun,

unable to pretend that everything was normal, to sun
yourself and watch the skies, wait for the storm
to pass. Your impatience could not be housed
by an absence that knew no other form but silence.
Worse than sleeping was the waking dream,
finding yourself alone and standing in the garden,

looking around, naming what you see: garden,
grass, trees, bent flowers dying under the hot sun,
knowing you haven’t been away, just in a dream,
wishing to hell that something would change, the storm
might break, the children next door might assault the silence.
After a while you give up, go back inside the house.

After this summer of silences, you are primed to storm
the garden’s barricades and reach up to pull the sun
down out of the sky, into your fever dreams, your hollow house.

The Sadness of Crows - Lynda Tavakoli

Before the day opens its eyes,
on a fence,
two black crows,
their thistle throats
rinsing the morning
with sorrow.

If I could,
I would offer them
the fragile bones
of a vanished chick,
its soul seeping quietly
into warm-dug earth.

I would tell them
it lay now in softest tissue,
belly feathers fluffed
and eyes of lazuline
puzzling the injustices
of ‘going light’.

For in the night
my sleep had met
their fledgless child
and I had known the flutter
of its death kiss
on my cheek.

Later, the boneyard
of my garden
would fold its limbs
about that curl of wing
and clutch of claw
in final flight.

Before the day closes its eyes,
on a fence, two crows,
messaging the sky
with longing for
a small remaining breath
in a dying afternoon.

The Bats of Kasanka - Eoin Hegarty

A thread is pulled
and the evening sky
unravels; silence
and a million wingbeats.

We gaze, suspended high
in our ‘butterfly tree’ –
have become tree –
bark and bole

and unblinking eyes;
hands raised like branches;
devices pocketing
what’s left of the light.

And just like that,
it clears. And the night sky sweeps in
with its stars and distances,
and we descend

the make-shift platform –
insect clicks and trills rising
in a static of cresting
and answering

energies; and we share a nip
of good whiskey, the moment
warming through us,
electric on our breaths.

Abstract Painting Of A Lake - Sighle Meehan

Read me like Corrib waters straying over rocks
manipulating, rummaging, bruising to the sea.

Read me like mayflies on the upper lake,
wind horseplaying on the shallows.

Read me wild like salmon jumping, surging home
new life frisking underneath the waves.

Read me to the depth of blackness, my greedy mouth
red-painted, and when I cry in the grey edges

cup me in your hands, willful through your fingers,
white, when love was young, my wedding dress

like swans at peace on the lower lake
their powerful wings preset to flight.

She Asks For Mercy - Ger Duffy

Before she reads her poem, she asks us
to forgive her father. We listen to, how
her mother fed the family on thin air sometimes, how
only when he left the house could they relax, how
his armies of words invaded her every thought, how
his arguments laced her days, how
his rages filled each room, how
for years they lived like this in one house, how
she sat in school each day in a daze.

She asks us for mercy for her father, so the damage
of his actions are hers to contemplate,
so she can gather him up in her arms, examine
the landscape of his life from son to father,
so the rains of despair that fell on him
and seeped into her can be expunged.
She asks us for our mercy first,
before she reads, we give it.

Apple Spirit - Susannah Violette

The day is light, which is not light,
but still the apples ripen.
I fill my pockets with brutal red.

Cleave my chest
as if you were splitting a log.

Inside I am spalted as marble cake.

The frou-frou of life contours
my softened heart like an oil slick.

Apple shamans bring lost parts home.

Outside my clothes are already winter,
a drab code of solitude.
The colour of sparrow, of safety.

I offer you my hand,
white as field mushroom,
and an apple in swallow-me red.

You take both like a smash ´n´ grab.

Livestock Auction - Daragh Byrne

My uncle, youngest of five, took on the farm.
The only boy. The only thing to do.
We’d go down in late August. He’d spin us yarns:

Tall tales of all the trouble we were due
While stopping in. Callow, not knowing birds,
Or the land, like he did; and trustful — all we knew

Of cunning country ways came from his words.
He took us to the mart. Ego on id.
Staid old men nodding at the auctioned herds.

I swung from railings. Enough to make a bid:
He told me, smiling, that I’d bought a lamb.
I never saw it. I’m still not sure I did.

When I think of him, I think of being a man.
Craft buried in humour. He wore the weight
Of it lightly. And I think of who I am —

Long limbs swinging from an old farmyard gate.