The Judges
Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19. His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City will be published early in 2023. Among his other books are Yeats on Theatre (2021), A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002), A History of the Media in Ireland (2009) and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016). He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel. He was the 2022 Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and curated the Unseen Plays series for the Abbey Theatre (2021); from 2009 to 2014, he served as the first chair of the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. He was elected to Membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, and to Fellowship of Trinity in 2016.
Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic. His London novel Vauxhall (Telegram, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange. Plays include Stop and Search (Arcola Theatre), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), and for radio The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the first Richard Imison Award. He presented BBC Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme Night Waves and is the founding editor of WritersMosaic.
Marie Hermet lives in Paris. She became a literary translator, reader and scout for French publishing houses after a stint as a costume designer for film and several years of doctorate research on Hollywood writers in the 1940s. So far she has translated over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction from English, some by favorite Irish authors Donal Ryan, Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger.
Marie also teaches translation and creative writing at the Université Paris Cité, where her curricula have a strong focus on Irish literature.
In 2017, Marie Hermet was the recipient of a Literature Ireland–Trinity College Dublin translator residency. With Cliona Ni Riordain she holds the annual Literary Translation Workshop in French; she also translated excerpts from two Irish works for Literature Ireland’s Talking Translations podcast series: Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig and Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Narrow Land.
Among the Irish authors who have won literary awards in her French translations are Roddy Doyle, Plus froid que le pôle (Prix festival Atlantide 2017), and Donal Ryan, Par une mer basse et tranquille (Prix Jean-Monnet de littératures européennes 2021).
Sarah Moss was born in Glasgow and grew up in northern England. She is the author of eight novels, including The Fell, Summerwater and Ghost Wall. She has BA, M. St. and D.Phil degrees in English Literature from Oxford University and taught at the universities of Kent, Exeter, Iceland and Warwick before moving to Dublin where she teaches on the MA and MFA in Creative Writing at UCD.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual poet, essayist and translator. Written on the roof of a free car park in Ireland, her prose début ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ went on to be described as “powerful” (New York Times) and “captivatingly original” (The Guardian). It won the James Tait Black Prize and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book. Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.
Arunava Sinha translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali to English, and from English to Bengali. Over seventy of his publications have been published so far. He has won several translation awards in India, and has been shortlisted for a number of international awards. He is the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation.