The Judges 2021

PROF. CHRIS MORASH (Non-Voting Chair) is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19. He has published extensively on Irish culture, including studies of Irish Famine literature, A History the Irish Theatre 1601-2000, A History of the Media in Ireland, and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016). 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. He is originally from Nova Scotia.

JAN CARSON is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her books include her novel Malcolm Orange Disappears, a short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press) and two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories and Postcard Stories 2 (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland in 2019 and the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction in 2020. It was also shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize in 2020. The Last Resort, a ten part BBC Radio 4 short story series and accompanying short story collection is forthcoming from Doubleday in early 2021. In 2018 Jan was the inaugural Translink/Irish Rail Roaming Writer in Residence on the Trains of Ireland. She was the Open Book Scotland Writer in Lockdown 2020. Photo by Jess Lowe.

DAVID JAMES KARASHIMA is an author, translator and associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He co-edited (with Elmer Luke) the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is co-editor (with Michael Emmerich) of Pushkin Press’s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, his book on Haruki Murakami’s early English translators/translations, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2020.

DR. RITA SAKR was born and grew up in Lebanon reading world literature in three languages, studied and worked at British universities, and has been living in Ireland for the past ten years. She is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University. Among various other publications, she is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Studyand ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies, co-editor of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut, and co-director/co-producer of the RCUK-funded documentary on Beirut, White Flags. Rita currently researches literary/cultural production related to forced displacement and serves on committees and projects focused on migration and sanctuary.

DR MARTÍN VEIGA is a Cork-based Galician poet, translator and academic. He lectures in Hispanic Studies at University College Cork and is the director of the Irish Centre for Galician Studies. His poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the author of six award-winning poetry collections, including As últimas ruínas (Espiral Maior Poetry Prize), Ollos de ámbar (Esquío Poetry Prize), Fundaxes (Fiz Vergara Vilariño Poetry Prize) and Diario de Crosses Green, translated into English by Keith Payne as Diary of Crosses Green. His most recent books are the poetry collection a ganancia e a perda and the bilingual Galician-English volume Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. In 2017 he was awarded the Pedrón de Honra Prize for his trajectory in the international promotion of Galician culture. Photo by Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez.

ENDA WYLEY is an Irish poet, author and teacher. She has published six collections of poetry, from her debut Eating Baby Jesus, (1993 ), through to Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems, (2014), and her most recent, The Painter on his Bike (2019 ), all published by Dedalus Press. Awards include the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Melbourne University and she is a recipient of a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry. She has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised, including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. Her books for children include, I won’t Go to China! Boo and Bear and The Silver Notebook, O’Brien Press. With her husband Peter Sirr she co-hosts the podcast Books for Breakfast, about books and writing. Enda Wyley is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists.