Jamie O’Halloran Announced as the Winner The Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition 2025

Jamie O’Halloran was last night announced as the winner of the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition 2025, with her poem ‘LEAF’. The judge for the competition Anne Fitzgerald said, “LEAF this year’s winning poem of the 2025 Desmond O’Grady’s International Poetry Competition is shot-through with the attributes of what makes a piece of writing a poem. The poet’s poetic inventiveness and skill here, imbues us with a sense of that intangible quality of what makes poem a good poem.”

Jamie O’Halloran has published five chapbooks including The Visible Woman and Corona Connemara & Half a Crown. Her poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Crannóg, One Hand Clapping, Banshee, Prairie Schooner and others, and in a dozen anthologies. Her debut collection is forthcoming this year from Drunk Muse Press.The announcement took place at the annual Desmond O’Grady Memorial Reading in association with Poetry Ireland.

The winning poem:

LEAF by JAMIE O’HALLORAN (Galway)

Runner-up

EDWARD DENNISTON – Half Inch O.S. Map (Waterford)

Highly Commended

AIDAN CASEY – The Edge (A Historical Enquiry) (Spain)

DAMEN O’BRIEN – The Calendars (Australia)

ROBBIE MARTZEN – Shards (Luxemburg)

SANDEEP KUMAR MISHRA – The Letter Never Delivered (India)

HEATHER CAMERON – A day in the life of (Australia)

BERNADETTE GALLAGHER – And the snow fell and stayed for days (Ireland)

JORDAN GREENAN – We Are the Last Hands They Touch (Norther Ireland)

(Pictured: Dominic Taylor, Director of Limerick Writers’ Centre, Jamie O’Halloran, competition winner, and judge of the competition Anne Fitzgerald) – Photo: Patrick Thomas Howard.