The Time Before Now

Sexton attended Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast for his creative writing degree, where he began to write poetry more seriously. After graduating, he continued at Queen’s for his PhD in creative writing. Oils, his debut pamphlet, was published in 2014 by the Emma Press and won the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice. In 2017, Sexton finished his PhD program and won the UK National Poetry Competition. The following year, he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

2019 saw the publication of Sexton’s first full-length, If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin). A highly acclaimed collection, it won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the John Pollard Poetry Prize. It was also named a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, New Statesman, and Telegraph. If All the World and Love Were Young addresses the death of Sexton’s mother in 2012 through the lens of the 1990 Super Nintendo game Super Mario World, taking its reader through each level of the game in an exploration of loss, memory, and the shape of reality.

Sexton’s writing has appeared in Poetry, Granta, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other major publications. His poems have been featured in anthologies including Best British Poetry 2015, Switching Off Darkness: Young Irish Poets, and The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland. He has also participated in BBC Radio Four documentaries We Will Arise and Go Now and Driving Bill Drummond. His latest collection, Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin, 2021)—a fantastical journey through real and imagined pasts—is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. A lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, Sexton counts Anne Carson, Ciaran Carson, Sinéad Morrissey, and Sylvia Plath among his poetic influences. He currently lives in Derry.

Watson was shortlisted for the Dermot Healy Poetry Award in 2017. In 2018, she was chosen as one of the 2018 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series poets and supported Hera Lindsay Bird in the 2018 International Literary Festival Dublin. She also won the Doolin Writers’ Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Mairtín Crawford Award. Her debut pamphlet, The Stack of Owls Is Getting Higher, was published by the Emma Press in 2019. Drawing from Watson’s travels in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, the poems in the collection navigate both the American Deep South and Watson’s native Belfast, joining imagery of nature’s fecundity with uniquely human struggles.

Watson’s writing has been published in many journals, including The Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, The Vacuum, The Cormorant, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Tangerine. Her poem “This Is Just to Say (the Gays Will Steal Your Fruit)” was commissioned by the Dublin Fringe Festival for the event The North is Next in 2019, and her long poem “Hello, I Am Alive” was published in—and provided the name for—Poetry Ireland’s e-book Hello, I Am Alive. Watson’s short stories have been published in the anthologies Still Worlds Turning (No Alibis Press, 2019) and Belfast Stories (Doire Press, 2019). Her story “Sonny’s Bench” was performed by the actor Ian McElhinney for BBC Radio 4. She has also been shortlisted for the Brian Moore Short Story Award.

Previously a sub-editor with newspapers including London’s Sunday Times, Dublin’s News of the World, and Belfast’s Daily Mirror, Watson is currently working toward her PhD in prose poetics at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She is also at work on a first novel, with support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She lives in Belfast with her wife and her son, Art.

Originally from Lagos, Nigeria, Hart started working with words at the age of 13. In secondary school, he was part of a rap group, Domack, which helped him sharpen and improve his writing skills. In 2010, Hart received a scholarship to study in Ireland for a year of medical school preparation, during which he lived in the small town of Tralee, County Kerry. The next year, Hart began attending University College Cork’s pharmacy program. He continued to write, switching from rap to poetry, and saw his work published in the University College Cork’s Motley magazine and The Moth.

In 2016, Hart moved to Dublin from Cork, where he began his career as a spoken-word poet, performing in open mics and poetry slams. In 2017, he won the Slam Sunday Grand Slam, which qualified him to perform at Electric Picnic as part of the Cúirt festival, and became an All Ireland poetry slam finalist. Since then, he has performed for festivals including Mother Tongues, St. Patrick’s, Dublin Fringe, Drogheda Arts, Spirit of Folk, Body & Soul, and First Fortnight.

With poet FeliSpeaks, Hart co-founded poetry collective WeAreGriot in 2018, which curates art events around poetry. As part of WeAreGriot, Hart co-wrote the spoken-word play Boy Child and spoken-word variety show See True and curated the hip-hop and poetry slam series Talkatives. His other works include poem films RedBeard Paddy and Lantern Smoke, the latter of which was a runner-up for the Button Poetry 2017 Video Contest. Hart was also Africa Day 2018 Champion, serving as host and performer for the festivities. His work has been published in journals including Poetry Ireland Review. With Nithy Kasa, he is currently one of two poets commissioned by Poetry Ireland in 2020 to generate new work, which for Hart will take the form of a multimedia poem film addressing the immigrant experience and the idea of home.

A poet and singer-songwriter, K blends her Zimbabwean cultural heritage and her Irish upbringing in her work. Much of her creative output intertwines Southern African myths and local languages, while also giving glimpses of nature in all its forms. In K’s recent works, she explores the stretches and beauty of being a black woman in modern-day Ireland, as well as what it truly means to be a diaspora baby.

In 2019, K was published in Dedalus Press’s anthology Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets. She was selected as one of Poetry Ireland’s Versify 2019 poets, and she was a panelist for the IASIL Conference 2019 event “Are We Doing Diversity Justice?”. In 2020, she worked alongside Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi in the production of poetry and music showcase SEE x SEA, part of the Mother Tongues Festival, which touched on themes of black womanhood, identity, and home. She performed in the International Literature Festival Dublin, collaborating with Tariro Takavarasha on the project The Language I Cannot Speak, a set of poems and stories exploring Shona identity and storytelling traditions. K was also featured in Rua Red’s first online See Through Café event.

K has been published in spaces including Seventh Wave, Unapologetic, and Boston Accent Lit. She founded youth arts collective Royal Integrity while still a teenager. She currently works as a copywriter and studies business and marketing at Dublin’s Institute of Public Administration.