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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Mary Ann Kenny: ‘I was crying out for help, for myself and for my children'
It was a bright afternoon in April 2015 when Mary Ann Kenny, a university lecturer, received a call that changed her life. Her husband, John, with whom she had two young sons, had collapsed while out jogging near their home in south Dublin. Kenny was told to get to the hospital as quickly as she could and to bring someone with her. 'I said to my colleague just beside me at work: 'Something's happened to John. I think he's dead and I have to go to the hospital. Will you drive me?' And sure enough, I was told in the hospital car park. Actually, the guard met me there, and he told me John had died.' He was 60 years old. Struggling to cope with the shock of her husband's death and the loneliness that engulfed her life in the aftermath, her grief turned to depression, which later progressed into psychotic delusions. 'I developed very suddenly, out of the blue, a delusional belief that my children had been harmed by my medication and that it was in some way my fault, and that belief took hold of me,' she tells Róisín Ingle on the Irish Times Women's Podcast. READ MORE 'There was nothing else I could think of ... I believed somehow the children had swallowed my medication. I thought it was my fault, I thought maybe I'd left it lying around ... or maybe, worst-case scenario, that I had done it intentionally.' [ 'Losing my husband, losing my mind': Mary Ann Kenny says she is living proof people can recover from severe mental illness Opens in new window ] The mother of two says she was completely 'consumed' by this delusion, which led her to believe her sons had been 'irreversibly damaged', that their brains had been impacted and that they would 'fail spectacularly academically' or 'never be able to make friends'. While attending a mental-health day clinic, Kenny divulged this worry about her children and the medication to one of the staff, who referred her on for in-patient treatment at a psychiatric hospital. 'I think by sharing it like that, I was crying out for help – for myself and for my children. That's what I was doing by unburdening myself,' she says. 'It was dismissed as irrelevant ramblings, but there was a meaning to the whole thing and there was possibly even a purpose to the whole thing, which was to get help and – you know what – I did get help,' she says. Kenny details this journey from the depths of despair, into psychosis and then back to reality in her new memoir, The Episode . In it, she reflects on her 12 weeks in psychiatric care, why she ultimately felt let down by the healthcare system and how she gradually found health and happiness again. You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Had I poisoned my children?' How a widow's grief sent her spiralling into delusion
Mary Ann Kenny first met her husband in 2000, at a conference in Dundee. 'It was a coup de foudre – 'a bolt of lightning',' the 60-year-old languages lecturer says with a smile. 'We had finally found what had taken both of us a very long time to find.' John was from Chester, Kenny was from Dublin, and the couple had a long-distance relationship until he moved to Ireland to live with her in 2008. 'We had our two small kids, our lovely house, our friends; it just seemed like we had all our ducks in a row. It had taken a long time to get there – we had our kids a little bit later in life – but I felt that everything was perfect. Then John left my life just as suddenly as he entered it; one day he was there, then he was gone.' In April 2015, three days after her 50th birthday party, Kenny came out of a work meeting to find she had a series of missed calls. She rang John's phone and it was answered by a garda (police officer) who told her to come to the hospital and bring somebody with her. 'I knew, I just knew immediately – and I said to my colleague: something has happened to John; I think he's dead.' John had collapsed and died, age 60, from undiagnosed cardiovascular disease, while out jogging. 'He was a very fit, healthy, clean-living man,' says Kenny. 'My entire life came to a stop. Everything I had done prior to that – working, eating, drinking, socialising, enjoying myself – it all just ground to a halt. It was absolutely devastating.' Plunged into grief, Kenny tried desperately to maintain a sense of normality for her young children. But over the following months, things were to get even worse. Kenny went to see a therapist after John's death – her first experience of therapy, having had no history of mental illness. 'He said, your sadness, your distress, is completely within the norm and what's to be expected – even though, at the time, I was impatient to start to feel a bit better,' she says. Her GP prescribed sertraline, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, to help combat symptoms of anxiety and depression. Kenny was reluctant to take the medication. 'I waited for more than 24 hours before starting the drug, agonising over whether it was advisable at all, and fearing an adverse reaction,' she writes in her book, The Episode. 'Before going to bed on the evening of Sunday, 2 August, I took the prescribed dose for the first time. Some hours later, I awoke in a state of severe agitation. I was drenched in sweat, weak with nausea, and my legs and arms were prickling all over. I spent hours tossing in bed, gripped by terror over what was happening to me.' Just as she had feared, Kenny appeared to be experiencing a rare but severe reaction. She only ever took three doses but the burning sensation that spread throughout her body continued for weeks, preventing her from eating, sleeping or 'doing practically anything beyond the absolute necessities'. She returned to the doctor and 'the response I was given was, by and large, that this was a psychiatric problem. You need either a different medication, or you need more.' A psychiatrist prescribed clonazepam for her anxiety and venlafaxine, a serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, for her depression, and referred her to the mental health service, where she started attending a day centre that offered group therapy, art therapy and drama and mental health workshops. It was 2016 before she saw her original therapist again, and then only for one session. It was at this point that Kenny began to tip into paranoia. She developed a mistrust of authority figures, from the nurse who assessed her at the day centre to her children's school principal who called her to check in. Everyone, she began to believe, had an ulterior motive. 'I thought they suspected me of illicit drug use and addiction,' she says. 'My thoughts were getting ahead of reality – but reality itself was very precarious for me at that time.' Kenny became increasingly worried that the authorities would accuse her of being unfit to parent her children, and that they would be removed from her care. She herself was one of five siblings, but the others had all moved abroad, and their mother was in her 90s; Kenny hired a nanny and friends helped out, but childcare remained a struggle. Her mental state began to spiral, and she developed a dark and specific delusion: 'Out of the blue, this idea got into my head: the children are behaving differently and badly, and something has happened to them to do with the medication, and it's my fault.' She became haunted by the idea that she had accidentally poisoned her children – and then that she had poisoned them deliberately. 'They were aged eight and six at the time, they weren't crawling around like babies trying to swallow everything – but it was almost like I thought they could. Then I started thinking, well, I left the bag [of pills] lying around somewhere, and then, I must have done it by accident, perhaps while cooking? I would go through it over and over again, trying to figure it out; it tortured me.' In her book, she describes how she became 'tormented by an image of my evil self standing over the cooker on Sunday evening, pouring pills into the simmering food with the depraved intention of causing harm.' Kenny continued to attend daily group therapy sessions, keen to maintain the impression of normality in front of medical professionals, while also desperate to confess her imagined crime. Eventually, she blurted it out. 'I remember the nurse's worried expression,' she says in The Episode. 'She wrote in her notes that I held all my beliefs 'with great conviction'. It might be more accurate to say that the beliefs held me in their steely grip.' Kenny was prescribed antipsychotic medication and admitted to a psychiatric hospital a few days later. She didn't resist, despite disagreeing with the diagnosis of psychosis. 'I was at the end of my tether and in some ways I was relieved to just hand myself over to other people, to surrender.' During her time in hospital, Kenny says she spent 80% of her days 'just lying on my bed, ruminating, staring at the ceiling, looking out the window, feeling a very strong sense of dread in my body. Of course I thought about John and the loss, but I couldn't focus on it, because I believed I had destroyed my children's brains. I couldn't think of anything else.' She was discharged after two weeks and encouraged to start attending the day centre again, which she did for another four weeks. Initially, she appeared to have improved – she'd been eating and sleeping much more while in hospital – but soon she lost weight again and became withdrawn. 'I started to talk to the mental health professionals about my delusional belief, and tell them that I still believed it, I had always believed it, I never stopped believing it,' she says. 'I suppose things reached a crisis point.' In October, a social worker informed Kenny that she would be making a child-protection referral to Tusla, the child and family agency. After she missed one of the day centre sessions, a doctor and nurse arrived at her home and insisted she re-admit herself, voluntarily, to hospital (throughout her illness, she was never officially sectioned). Kenny has since obtained her medical records. The admission summary for her return states that she 'presented as 'guarded' during the admission process' and was 'unhappy with having to come back to hospital'. There are also references to her having 'blunted affect', 'poor eye contact' and 'low rate and tone of speech'. A week later, Kenny spotted that the door to her ward was open, and walked out. She planned to return home and resume childcare, but on finding her house empty called a friend in the hope of locating the children. The friend, who had indeed been watching her kids, promptly returned her to the hospital, where she was transferred to a high-security ward and watched by a member of the nursing staff 24 hours a day – 'even when I went to the bathroom'. 'I felt mortified that I had left the hospital and come back,' she says. 'I just could not believe how much trouble I had caused. My symptoms got worse and I believed I was living in a parallel world. I became utterly zoned out, and still, during that time, a lot of questions were being put to me about harm' – specifically whether she'd had any thoughts of harming herself or others, which she denied. Rather than discuss the enduring impact of her loss, or her apparent reaction to the medication, Kenny says she was regularly asked to rate how she was feeling on a scale of one to 10, and whether she'd experienced thoughts of suicide – 'all things that would have been on [doctors'] checklists and that were never tailored to the reality of my distressing lived experience'. The questioning continued and in the end, she says, she just 'threw in the towel'. She 'confessed to everything', feeling almost euphoric at finally being able to give the answers she felt the medical professionals had been waiting to hear. 'I just said: fine, you're right, I'm wrong. That was the tone of it. I think a narrative came into existence: that I had always, actually, had thoughts of suicide, homicide, infanticide. And it had very, very serious repercussions for me.' Kenny quickly came to regret her false admission, calling it disastrous. 'I wasn't allowed to see my children for four weeks.' She tried to retract her statement but felt there wasn't any 'willingness to listen' – the narrative seemed to be set in stone. Her treatment continued, with her medication altered. By November she was taking two antipsychotics, two antidepressants and a sleeping tablet, on top of the clonazepam she had been prescribed for anxiety. The delusions began to wane – giving way to a more physical ailment: severe constipation. The condition had progressed to such a stage that she was finding it difficult to walk, and would rush to the bathroom as many as 20 times a day. This was paired with a difficulty in passing urine, eventually diagnosed as a urinary tract infection. Reluctant to reveal the extent of the problem to medical professionals, she would wash her underwear secretly in the sink in her room. As Kenny's mental health continued to improve, she was granted visits with her children, first in the hospital, then at home. Before being discharged, however, she was required to attend a child protection conference, where the children were determined to be at ongoing risk of significant harm. Although this had little material impact on Kenny and her family, she was 'devastated' that her children's names were now on an at-risk register, where they would remain until they turned 18. She was discharged in December 2015, on condition that she get regular visits from numerous health professionals, and spent Christmas Day with her children, her mother and her older sister, who was visiting from New Zealand. 'It's extraordinary how fast I recovered,' says Kenny. By January 2016 she was able to return to work full-time. Her physical symptoms improved too, and her medication was gradually reduced. 'After I came off antidepressants, I began to feel things more intensely, and it wasn't just sadness over John's death that I was noticing,' she writes. 'More than anything, what I was feeling was anger over the powerlessness and indignities of my hospital experience two years previously.' In time, and with ongoing therapy, Kenny was able to reflect on her experience more clearly. She also began reading psychology and grief literature – both academic publications and personal memoirs – before enrolling for a BSc in psychology in 2018. She came to view what happened to her as a series of three traumatic events: the trauma of losing her husband, then the trauma of losing her mind – and lastly, the trauma of her psychiatric treatment. 'There was no sense even from [the mental health service] that this was an isolated episode,' says Kenny. 'There was never a prognosis which said I was going to get better.' She spent time ruminating on what could have been done better: 'What if I hadn't been discharged [from psychiatric hospital] the first time?' she asks in the book. 'What if anyone had ever talked to me properly about losing John, or about my adverse physical reaction to the sertraline medication, or about the unwarranted feelings of guilt, or about why I said the things I said …' On the advice of a psychiatrist, she composed a five-page letter outlining her concerns about the care she had received during her illness, and was invited to discuss them in a meeting with her social worker, which she found helpful. Mid-2019, about nine months after her final discharge from the mental health service, she received her medical records – at which point she had already embarked on writing her book. Retelling her ordeal was painful at first, but she was driven by a desire to share what she now understands about the world of psychiatric care, about which so many of us know very little. 'If it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't believe it,' she says. Her sons, she writes, appear to have 'emerged relatively unscathed from the ordeal of being separated from me only a few short months after the loss of their father' – something that she credits to the support she received from friends and her mother, who died in 2020. Her first therapist also encouraged Kenny to try to view the loss of her husband as an opportunity to live her life in a way that she might not have otherwise been able to. Today, she says, 'it is true that I live my life at a much faster pace than I would have done had John still been around. We go away more – it's a more active life.' Having reconciled herself with the events of 2015, she views her story as one of resilience, of how she came to be stronger, more confident and even happier than she had been before she became unwell. 'My experience of those weeks was punishing and traumatising,' she writes. 'But at least I survived … Once I was able to trust that I was mentally and physically well again, I was overcome with joy at being alive.' The Episode by Mary Ann Kenny (£18.99) is published by Penguin Sandycove.
Irish Times
17-05-2025
- Health
- Irish Times
The Episode by Mary Ann Kenny: Moving memoir about loss and healing exposes troubling frailties in mental health services
The Episode: A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing Author : Mary Ann Kenny ISBN-13 : 978-1844886869 Publisher : Sandycove Guideline Price : £18.99 On a fine April morning in bright sunshine, Mary Ann Kenny's husband died suddenly while out jogging near their family home. John, the stay-at-home dad, had brought the children to school, popped in his earphones and gone out for a run. The Episode begins and nothing will ever be the same again. 'The first indication I had that something was wrong was when I glanced at my phone at around 1.45pm and noticed six missed calls.' It is the prelude to a descent into grief, psychosis and months of hospitalisation before a journey back to health and happiness. This is a story that tells many interconnecting and inter-related stories. Chief among them is the life of a family devastated by the sudden death of a father and husband and the traumas it triggers. We read about the limitations of mainstream psychiatry , the protective role played by family and friends, the tenacity of the human spirit and the exceptional bravery of Mary Ann Kenny. READ MORE [ The fall of an ancient tree is a sad occasion. It marks the death of a living monument Opens in new window ] [ Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt: a portrait of the sensualist as a young man Opens in new window ] Kenny's strength is demonstrated by her capacity to endure a catastrophic loss, crippling depression and the inadequacy of mental health services. This unflinching account serves as a strong illustration of her courage. She gains access to her medical files and quotes from her medical notes throughout the book. This provides the reader with a visceral, near-tangible sense of the world she was thrown into on the day her husband never returned home. She paints a painful picture of committed professionals operating in a psychiatric system preoccupied with risk. It is a system that focused on the symptoms resulting from the trauma she experienced, as opposed to the trauma itself. Over the course of her engagement with mental health services, the real episode - the devastating loss of her husband - is virtually never spoken about. This failure to truly acknowledge Kenny's devastating loss is as bewildering as it is distressing. Her tenacity and resilience, on the other hand, can only be described as utterly epic. This deeply personal and moving memoir offers wisdom and inspiration. It does more than that, too, addressing issues of urgent public interest. Mental health professionals and policy makers would benefit from reading it. Paul D'Alton is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of Psychology at UCD.
Irish Times
11-05-2025
- Health
- Irish Times
‘Losing my husband, losing my mind': Author says she is living proof people can recover from severe mental illness
We meet in Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney , south Co Dublin . It's near home for Mary Ann Kenny, and also near where her husband John collapsed one fine April day in 2015 while jogging, and died. His death left Kenny, a lecturer in German, and their two primary-school-aged boys stunned, grieving, their lives suddenly torn apart. Over the following months as they groped through life, Kenny's grief became intense, with depression and several physical and psychological symptoms, including delusions that her boys had taken her medication and been harmed. She lost touch with reality and developed psychosis, spending 10 weeks in a psychiatric hospital. It was a dark time. Ten years later, life is healthy and happy and she has written The Episode, a memoir about her personal experience of severe mental illness. It's remarkably detailed, drawing on her own memories and observations, and multiple medical and social-work files. There's a dizzying array of professionals, medications, treatments. Professionals and friends are anonymised, as is a day-care centre and psychiatric hospital. She steers an arresting course between an academic's rigorous research and pacy, insightful readability. Today there's no hint of what she's been through. 'I've been very good for a long time.' She's calm, analytical, articulate. READ MORE Many people go through grief, but hers was extreme, 'particularly cruel, I suppose'. Because it was sudden. Because she had two small children ('it's impossible to overstate the burden of that'). Because of her 'aloneness': John was an only child, her siblings lived abroad; she had very good friends but her main support came from her 90-year-old mother Bernie ('she's the hero'). Grief triggered a series of events, leading to psychosis. She talks about complex traumas: 'I lost control of everything ... I was obsessed with this belief that I had damaged my children, ruined my children's lives. It was one of the most traumatic things you could imagine. That there's no hope for them.' And then, 'what happened to me in hospital', where, she says, 'my identity was just torn to shreds'. Writing The Episode has helped her tease out the interplay of her feelings of guilt. The feeling that she hadn't protected the boys enough from life's cruelties somehow became an obsessional belief that she had damaged them, and led to psychosis. Over a few months everything spiralled and she went from attending a day centre to being admitted twice to a psychiatric hospital. She vividly portrays what it's like on the other side of constant questions, over and over, from multiple healthcare professionals. She'd like professionals 'to see what it feels like at the receiving end', she says. Mary Ann Kenny: 'I felt annihilated by my treatment, annihilated as a person.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill After intense assessments, she went on to tell professionals in October 2015 that she wanted to harm her own children, and herself. It's shocking to read. She writes: 'Why did I do it? Why did I say such appalling things – none of which was true and none of which I believed, even at the time, and all of which were guaranteed to make my situation so much worse? Because I thought I was living in a parallel realm and believed that what I was saying didn't matter in the real world inhabited by everyone else? 'Because I was close to collapse, having barely eaten during the preceding weeks, because of the effects of the antipsychotic medication on my prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functions? 'Because it seemed to me that the professionals with their faces of mistrust and frustration believed that I was guilty of something , and I myself thought I was guilty too? Because I had been asked the same questions over and over for two months and I couldn't fight them off any more? Because I wanted to be agreeable and to give the medical staff what they seemed to be looking for?' But having said what she said, 'my fate was sealed', she observes now. There has to be a better way of treating somebody in such distress. I felt annihilated by my treatment, annihilated as a person — Mary Ann Kenny The reader feels the frustration of the constant interrogation, but feels pity for the professionals too. Kenny knows this. She says 'the worst of the lies, the self-incriminating details, I blurted out in the first 10 days. Then I stopped. I started to come to my senses. It's incredible how quickly I actually regained my sanity after that, started to realise the delusional belief was wrong.' [ How I coped when grief became my new reality Opens in new window ] She realised, too, 'the seriousness of what I'd said'. Kenny acknowledges what the professionals must have feared, when she said she planned to harm her children and herself. 'I never did have those plans and intentions ... There's nothing more tragic than those cases, of a parent doing something to their children because they are mentally ill, maybe in ways not dissimilar to me." However, she says: 'I felt annihilated by my treatment, annihilated as a person, as a human being, as a mother, as a daughter, as a friend. I felt literally torn apart.' Psychotherapy later, privately, helped her process the trauma of 'losing my husband, losing my mind … Mostly I needed therapy to help me come to terms with my hospital experience'. Mary Ann Kenny exposed her inner turmoil and psychiatric illness, for reasons that were 'bigger than any need for privacy'. Photograph: iStock She observes, from reading about psychiatry as well her own experience of it, 'they treat symptoms. But they don't ask about the cause.' Our psychiatric system, she says, is 'all about risk assessment and risk prevention, for the severely mentally ill anyway, rather than care or therapeutic intervention for patients' sake.' [ Huge variations between hospitals in treatment of mental health emergencies Opens in new window ] She felt disempowered, she says. 'I thought I was going to die in there. I thought my children were going to be taken away from me. There has to be a better way. This was a person in distress, suffering, who led a completely normal life up to the day her husband died. Something has happened to her, and we have to help her.' She felt 'cast out. I felt a complete social failure. That is incredibly traumatic.' It was eight months out of her life. She sometimes thinks of it as 'having to break down in order to get the help I needed'. But it was an episode. It ended. 'And it never came back.' Ten years later, she's still working. Her sons are in secondary school. 'They're absolutely wonderful. We're a very, very happy, close unit, the three of us.' The weird thing is, after the episode ... I have never looked back. I've never had a day's depression since — Mary Ann Kenny 'Maybe the drugs worked. Who am I to say they didn't work?' Key was her delusions waning. 'I stopped believing I had harmed my children.' In her experience: 'Antipsychotics, they dull your cognitive activity, as well as your emotional feelings.' With a self-destructive, delusional belief, 'maybe that's exactly what you need. If you become like a zombie, which I did, maybe that's, in the first instance, beneficial.' Or 'perhaps it was the passage of time', and removal from daily life. [ Adam Loughnane asked for help at a Galway hospital. Three hours later he was dead Opens in new window ] 'All I know is, I was no longer obsessing about this one thing,' and instead started to worry about 'real-world worries. Maybe I just had no space left to worry about the imaginary thing ... And then I was better. It's extraordinary. How could you get so ill and then you get better?' Her experience puts in context how anyone can be vulnerable. Bad things happen; perhaps any person's life and mind could fall apart. But also, that people can recover from severe mental illness. 'I'm the living proof.' 'The weird thing is, after the episode ... I have never looked back. I've never had a day's depression since. I have never been crippled by grief again. There's a poignant, melancholic sadness about John ... I experienced an extreme collapse of my entire life. So when I got my life back, I was overcome with joy.' Ultimately, 'the whole experience made me stronger'. The first draft of what was to become her book took three years, writing for herself, to make sense of it all. She felt she'd gained insights into the psychology of her breakdown worth sharing. 'I think other people can learn from it. I didn't set out to bash the professionals, and I don't think I did.' [ Mental health in Ireland: 'Should we not be helping people before they get down to the breakdown stage?' Opens in new window ] She has exposed her inner turmoil and psychiatric illness, for reasons that were 'bigger than any need for privacy'. Reading her own records, she felt 'that's not my story. My personal truth about what happened to me is different from those files. And I want to put my story on the record.' The Episode, A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing, by Mary Ann Kenny is published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Random House
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Gustav Parker Hibbett wins John Pollard Prize
In The Irish Times this Saturday, Brian McGilloway tells Fiona Gartland about his new novel, The One You Least Suspect. Mary Ann Kenny tells Deirdre Falvey about her book, The Episode: : A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing. And there is a Q&A with Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin about her debut novel, Ordinary Saints. Reviews are Paschal Donohoe on How Feminist Economics Can Change the World by Emma Holten; Making Sense of Chaos by J Doyne Farmer; and Why We're Getting Poorer by Cahal Moran; Malachy Clerkin on The Last Ditch by Eamonn Sweeney; James Hanrahan on Abortion: A History by Mary Fissell; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Conor O'Clery on The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine by Alexander Vindman; Adam Wyeth on Writers Anonymous by William Wall; Huda Awan on Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp; Naoise Dolan on Gunk by Saba Sams; Henrietta McKervey on The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon; Andrew Roycroft on Dazzling Darkness: The Lives and Afterlives of the Christian Mystics & The Magic Theatre by James Harpur; Paul Clements on local history books; and Michael Cronin on Ghost Wedding by David Park. This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Gustav Parker Hibbett has received the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize for their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press) at an award ceremony in Trinity College Dublin this evening, Thursday, May 8th. READ MORE This is the seventh year of the prize, which is awarded annually for an outstanding debut collection of poetry in the English language. Valued at €10,000, the prize is sponsored by the John Pollard Foundation and administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre in the School of English at Trinity. Parker Hibbett is a poet and essayist. Raised in New Mexico, USA, they are currently based in Dublin where they are the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. They are also pursuing a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin. Parker Hibbett said: 'Since publishing High Jump as Icarus Story, there have been so many small ways, almost daily, that I've been disarmed or humbled or bowled over by other people's care and generosity, by the time so many people have taken simply to sit with my writing. With this award, I'm bowled over in a really big way. 'This year's other shortlisted collections, which create the context of what this award means, all share what is one of my favourite qualities in poetry: the ambition and ability to expand the boundaries of what language can do, what it can hold and remake and conjure. It has been an honour to be here next to them, just as it is a honour now to see my collection next to the impressive lineage of winning collections. I'm very aware that we can choose how we engage with art—what we bring with us when we meet it, how willing we are to take it on its own terms—and that each kindness my book receives is a choice. 'The whole team at Banshee—in particular Jessica Traynor, Eimear Ryan and Laura Cassidy—were the first to meet this book with kindness. They received it with exceptional care, and they joined, with enthusiasm, in the project of helping it grow. The support of my friends and family, particularly my partner Abbie, has been another great kindness that I wouldn't be able to write without. Thank you, of course, massively, to the judging panel—Eoin McNamee, Una Mannion and Tom Walker—for coming to my book with such generosity, and thank you as well to Stephen Vernon, Provost Linda Doyle, and Trinity College Dublin at large for your belief and investment in poetry. What an incredible honour this is. I am endlessly grateful.' Previous winners are Patrick James Errington, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Gail McConnell, Diane Louie, Isabel Galleymore, and Hannah Sullivan. Prof Eoin McNamee, director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre, said: 'Gustav Parker Hibbett's debut is a collection of remarkable range and in their own words, unlikely magic, the poet as Icarus falling through selves or rising up to meet them. At once exalted and humble this is work of the highest order.' High Jump as Icarus Story was also shortlisted for the 2024 TS Eliot Prize and the 2025 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. The five shortlisted titles for the 2025 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, announced by Listowel Writers' Week. The winner of the €20,000 prize will be revealed at the festival's opening night on May 28th. Photo: Dominic Walsh. Colm Tóibín, Joseph O'Connor, Donal Ryan, Niall Williams, and Christine Dwyer Hickey have been shortlisted for the 2025 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, unveiled today by Listowel Writers' Week. The winner will be announced at the festival's opening night on 28th May. Sponsored by Kerry Group, the award carries a total prize fund of €22,000, with €20,000 awarded to the winner and €500 for each shortlisted author. 'Kerry Group's 31-year partnership with Listowel Writers' Week stands as a testament to our enduring belief in the power of storytelling to inspire and connect,' Catherine Keogh, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Kerry Group, said. 'Each year, the calibre of literary talent and vision among the shortlisted writers astounds us, and this year is no exception. We extend our congratulations to all of this year's nominees and eagerly await the announcement of the winning work later this month.' This year's adjudicators, authors Carol Drinkwater and Paul McVeigh, reviewed 48 submitted novels and carefully selected five outstanding titles that reflect the strength, imagination, and storytelling brilliance of contemporary Irish fiction. The shortlisted titles are: Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey; The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor; L ong Island by Colm Tóibín; Time of the Child by Niall Williams; and Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan. Ned O'Sullivan, chairperson of the Board of Listowel Writers' Week, said, 'The Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award is a valued part of our festival's celebration of Irish writing. We are sincerely thankful to Kerry Group for their continued and generous support. Congratulations to the five shortlisted authors, your novels reflect the richness and diversity of contemporary Irish fiction, and we're proud to honour your work here in Listowel.' * What is Wild? a talk by Mark Cocker, award-winning author of creative non-fiction, naturalist, columnist and broadcaster will take place in St Patrick's Church, Curtlestown, Enniskerry, Co Wicklow at 5.30pm on Saturday, May 17th as part of the Dawn 'til Dusk events in the Shaking Bog festival. Also concert & readings featuring poet, Jane Robinson, violinist, Lynda O'Connor and cellist/composer, Ailbhe McDonagh at 7.30pm on Saturday, May 17th in the same venue. * Olga Dermott-Bond has won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition 2025 as part of this year's Strokestown International Poetry Festival for her poem René Laennec Remembers the day he dreamt a stethoscope. Judge Jane Clarke said: 'The winning poem is a sparkling tribute to the French physician and musician René Laennec who invented the stethoscope. Through gorgeous imagery, rhyme and rhythm the poem conveys the compassion, empathy and commitment that inspired his discovery. The metaphor of the patient's heart beat as 'distant muffled hooves' is surprising, yet perfect for this standout poem that pulses with life. 'Among the 700-plus entries, many poems stood out and warranted rereading. The five shortlisted poems shone in their exploration of relationships with both intimacy and restraint, bringing diverse people, times, and places to life through a deft use of language that evokes music and imagery.' Now in its 24th year, the winner receives €1,000 while the following four shortlisted poets receive €250: Paul McMahon; Winifred McNulty; Judy O'Kane; and Matthew Wimberley. * Considering the colossal shadow cast by Jonathan Swift over Irish literature for 300 years, it seems surprising how little he or his work have appeared in Irish theatre. WB Yeats brought Swift, and his long-time lady friend Stella, into his largely forgotten one-act play The Words Upon the Window-Pane. There has been little else of Swift before or since. That is, until Dublin writer Gerry Mullins wrote Jonathan Swift: Savage Indignation, and premiered it to a full house and a standing ovation at St Patrick's Cathedral last November. Adapting poems by Swift and Stella, and angry letters by Swift's other lady friend, Vanessa, Mullins has written a very entertaining musical about the tumultuous time in each of their lives when the two women found out about each other. Jonathan Swift: Savage Indignation plays next during the Swift and Vanessa Festival in Celbridge, Kildare, on May 31st ( ); and The Lark in Balbriggan, Dublin, on July 5th ( ).
