Here’s an interview with the Tullamore Tribune following my Exceptional Offaly Person of the Year 2016 Award: Harrowing Childhood Of Exceptional Offaly Person Award Recipient, Thursday, October 6, 2016.
“Home is a place where you feel safe and secure, a refuge from the chaos. Home is a stake you put in the ground at nine years old and declare, this is where I’m going to flourish, and nobody is going to take it from me.”
Click here to read the interview.
Irish Central Review of Little Witness.
Emmanuel Touhey does it again: Here’s another review he wrote for Irish Central: “An Irish poet in America recalls the dark secrets of her youth”
Exceptional Offaly Person of the Year 2016: Connie Roberts
I’m thrilled to announce the wonderful news that the Executive Committee of the Tullamore Show has selected me as the Exceptional Offaly Person of the Year 2016. I will be presented with the award at the Tullamore Show on August 14th.
Irish Times Review: “Connie Roberts, a poetic witness who will not be silenced”
Powerful review from Emmanuel Touhey:
“It is a haunting and harrowing accounting of a beleaguered young life. These poems are not for the faint of heart. They will grab you when you want to look the other way.”
Notre Dame University Irish Studies Journal Breac Review: “A call to bear witness, brazen”
A great review from Brian F. McCabe:
“A dark and entirely moving work, Little Witness emerges from a history Ireland might prefer to forget, one of Magdalen laundries, poorhouses, and in which the buried children, like those of Tuam, continue to cry out for an advocate. Roberts fills this role, as she writes in one poem, with blazing truth.”
RTE Radio One Poetry Programme: Connie Roberts, Catriona O’Reilly & Peter Duffy
Rick O’Shea interviews me for the Poetry Programme. Great chat about Seamus Heaney, Mary Raftery and Peter Tyrrell.
Irish Times Review of Little Witness
John McAuliffe reviews Little Witness and Medbh McGuckian’s Blaris Moor.
2016 is off to a great start, between the Shine/Strong Award shortlisting and now this bit of wonderful news: The trustees of the estate of Katherine Kavanagh have awarded me a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Award worth 8,000 euros.
Fellow recipients include Nell Regan, Fred Johnston, Nicholas McLachlan and Dairena Ní Chinnéide. The awards are made in recognition of a number of factors, balancing the criteria of need, commitment to the literary life, achievement so far and promise for the future.
I am thrilled with the news that Little Witness has been shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Poetry Award. The Shine/Strong Poetry Award is presented annually to the author of the best first collection of poems published in English or Irish by an Irish poet in the previous year. Recent winners of the Award include Caoilinn Hughes, Tara Bergin, Michelle O’Sullivan, Grace Wells and Peadar Ó hUallaigh. This year’s award is judged by Kevin Barry and the recipient will receive €1,000. The award will be announced on Sunday 13th March 2016 at the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival, Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin.
www.poetryireland.ie/news/mountains-to-sea-dlr-book-festival
Connie Roberts Poet 