The Arts Office, Waterford City & County Council is pleased to announce the winners of the Waterford Poetry Prize 2025.
First place is awarded to David McLoghlin, Ballincollig, Cork. He is the prize-winning author of three collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry, most recently Crash Centre, shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize. His writing has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Literary Hub, Poetry Foundation, broadcast on RTE’s Poetry People, WNYC’s Radiolab, and many other journals in the USA and Ireland. His writing has been translated into Spanish, Bulgarian and German. He has received recognition and support in the form of prizes, grants and fellowships from The Arts Council, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Patrick Kavanagh Awards, The Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship, and a teaching fellowship from New York University. He also writes personal essays and memoir and has work forthcoming in University of Michigan Press’s “Under Discussion” series. He teaches Creative Writing (poetry and memoir) widely in Ireland and in the USA (via Zoom). The winning poem of the Waterford Poetry Prize 2025 is titled ‘West Cork Model Railway Village, Clonakilty’.
Second place goes to ‘Anaphora’ by Jackie Gorman a poet from Athlone. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Lonely Crowd and others. Her debut collection was published in 2019 by the Onslaught Press, UK and described by Martin Dyar in Poetry Ireland Review as an “engrossing and ecologically attuned debut.” She has a Masters in Poetry Studies from DCU and was the recipient in 2024 of the John Broderick Emerging Writers Bursary. She has previously received the Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Award and was part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She has completed residences at Cill Rialag and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and has received two Agility Awards from the Arts Council.
Third prize goes to Róisín Leggett Bohan from Cork. She had won the Patrick Kavanagh Award 2025 and was runner up last year. She has been shortlisted for The Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work features in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Manchester Review, Banshee, Magma, Aesthetica, The Pomegranate London and RTE Radio 1. Several of her poems are published in Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025). Róisín was awarded a literature bursary from The Arts Council. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC and is the co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing. Her poem which is placed third in the Waterford Poetry Prize is called ‘If I were from Mandalore, lifted by a gargantuan raptor’.
Margaret Organ, Arts Officer and Curator of the Waterford Writers Weekend thanked everyone from around the country for sending in their poems and said that this years’ adjudicator Jessica Traynor had difficult decisions to make and the winning poems are an indication of the quality of poems submitted.
If you would like to hear Jessica read the winning poems and the reason for her choices go to: