A TRALEE native has won a prestigious poetry award.

Conor Cleary is the winner of the 2018 Patrick Kavanagh Award. The result was announced at the present Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, on Friday.

A former Mercy Mounthawk student, Conor Cleary now lives in Glasgow. He has recently graduated with an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, where he was the recipient of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre MA Award.

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His work has appeared in Icarus, The Tangerine, Poetry Ireland Review and The Stinging Fly. He was a participant in the 2017 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series.

The judge of the Kavanagh Award, Brian Lynch, outlined why Conor won the award.

“Ten poets were bunched together at the finish, but Conor Cleary won out because his combination of raw talent and sharp but sympathetic intelligence speaks so clearly for a new kind of Irish migrant, who is neither a foreigner at home nor an exile abroad.”

The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is an Irish poetry award for a collection of poems by an author who has not previously been published in collected form. It is confined to poets born on the island of Ireland, or of Irish nationality, or a long-term resident of Ireland.