Jane Clarke, who is originally from Fuerty and now lives in Co Wicklow, is one of two Irish writers who has been nominated for the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize.
Picture Credit: bloodaxebooks.com
The prize is awarded annually to a book of the highest literary merit – fiction, non-fiction or poetry – that best evokes the spirit of a place. The Fuerty native has been nominated for Her first collection entitled “The River” which was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. Moniza Alvi, who is one of the Ondaatje Prize judges describes the collection as “Quiet, lucid, subtle poems, nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background in rural Ireland, and the poet’s enduring attachment to it.”
Jane combines writing with her work as a management consultant in not-for-profit organisations. Last month she won the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry with three poems from “The River” – ‘For Isobel’, ‘Blue Bible’ and ‘Every Tree’. She has previously received the Listowel Writer’s Week Poetry Collection Prize in 2014 for the then unpublished first collection and also won the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010) and Listowel Writers’ Week (2007).
The winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize will be announced on Monday May 23rd.