Athlone's Jackie Gorman receives €7,000 emerging writers bursary

Local poet Jackie Gorman has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 John Broderick Emerging Writer's Bursary.

Jackie Gorman is from Athlone, and her poetry has been published in a number of journals in Ireland, the UK, and the USA.

She received the Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Award in 2017. She has a Masters in Poetry Studies from the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at DCU.

Jackie's debut collection The Wounded Stork was published in 2019 by The Onslaught Press, UK.

She has also featured in the Ireland Chair of Poetry Anthology Hold Open The Door published by UCD Press in 2022 to mark the 25th anniversary of Seamus Heaney receiving the Nobel Prize.

In 2021 and 2023, she received Agility Awards from the Arts Council for poetry projects on Westmeath ecology and biodiversity loss respectively.

In a recent essay on the history of literature in Westmeath, her work was described by Dr Mary Shine Thompson of DCU as having "a diction that is uncluttered, economical, understated and intense...For her, poetry is life and death."

The Bursary is worth €7,000 and is part of the Arts Council/Westmeath Arts John Broderick Centenary.

It is designed to help facilitate the creation of new work.