2 – Matthew Rice

Welcome to Day 2 of our West Cork Literary Festival Advent Calendar. Our author today is Matthew Rice.

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The Tangerine, and in the anthology The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear), and Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press / University of Chicago Press).  He was awarded runner-up for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2017, and was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series the same year.  He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently undertaking a Northern Bridge funded PhD at The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.  His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press), was published in 2021, and was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Matthew is reading an extract from The Last Weather Observer which was published by Summer Palace Press in spring 2021. Today’s video unlocked on 2nd December 2021 and may be viewed below. Closed caption subtitles are available and may be turned on or off. Click on “youtube” or “full screen” icon in the video to watch it in full screen or visit youtube here.

About our WCLF Literary Advent Calendar

2021 was another wonderful year for Irish writing and so many incredible books by Irish authors and authors living in Ireland were released this year. Even though festivals returned in-person and online not every author had the opportunity to launch their books with a public celebration or to engage with audiences in the “usual” way. We’re delighted to bring you a small selection of these authors and we’ve invited twenty-four writers to submit a short video reading from their new books. Our selection is an attempt to show the wide range of Irish writing and in particular to focus on writers whose books we feel deserve more attention and those who were not previously featured in WCLF 2021 events. We hope that you will enjoy the chance to hear these writers reading their own work and to discover some new books for your reading piles.