Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award Reading With Award Recipient Mark Roper

In Partnership with Poetry Ireland

Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann and The New Hibernia Review are delighted to present The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award Reading at Dublin Book Festival. Expect readings from this year’s Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Awardee Mark Roper among other leading Irish poets. The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry is an annual Irish poetry award administered by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas. It was established in 1997 through the generous support of Lawrence O’Shaughnessy and the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Family Foundation. The award is unique because it is specifically intended to honor a poet resident in Ireland for a significant contribution to Irish poetry. The award has gone to a substantial group of contemporary Irish poets, including Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Dennis O’Driscoll, Peter Sirr, Moya Cannon, Louis de Paor, Dermot Bolger, Kerry Hardie, Thomas McCarthy, Gerry Murphy, Patrick Deeley, and Leontia Flynn. The 2026 recipient was Enda Wyley.

Mark Roper is the 31st recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas (MN). Mark Roper is an Ireland-based poet closely associated with Dedalus Press and particularly with the landscape and natural world of southeast Ireland. He was born in Derbyshire in 1951, studied at Oxford University, and moved to Ireland in 1980. He has lived for many years in the southeast, and the landscapes of Waterford, Kilkenny, the River Suir, the Comeragh Mountains. His major poetry collections include The Hen Ark (1990), which won the Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection; Catching the Light (1997); Whereabouts (2005); Even So: New & Selected Poems (Dedalus, 2008); A Gather of Shadow (Dedalus, 2012); Bindweed (Dedalus, 2017); and Beyond Stillness (Dedalus, 2022). A Gather of Shadow won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014, while both it and Bindweed were shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Beyond Stillness was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for nature and environmental poetry. He served as editor of Poetry Ireland in 1999.

Sponsored by the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Family Foundation and Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas