Micheal Longley and Martina Evans

Michael Longley has published many books of poetry. His most recent, The Slain Birds, in 2022. In 2001, Longley received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He has won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Michael Longley was appointed a CBE in 2010. From 2007 to 2010, he was Ireland’s Professor of Poetry. In 2017, he received the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2018, he was awarded the inaugural Yakamochi Medal, an international poetry prize from Toyama Prefecture, Japan. He is a Freeman of the city of Belfast.

Martina Evans grew up in County Cork and trained in Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Her latest collection is American Mules, winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize for 2022. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and an Irish Times poetry critic.