Transpoesie - Poets

Stephen Sexton’s debut collection, If All the World and Love Were Young, detailed how a video game helped him come to terms with grief. The Collection of poems, published by Penguin in August 2019, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Stephen also wrote a pamphlet of poems, Oils, published by the Emma Press in 2014, which was the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice of that year. He was the winner of the UK National Poetry Competition in 2016, and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018

The author from Co Down has his work published in leading journals in the UK and Ireland such as Granta, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review, as well as a number of American publications, including POETRY and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Poems were featured in The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland, edited by Sinéad Morrissey and Stephen Connolly. His work has also been featured in Switching Off Darkness: Young Irish Poets, an anthology of poems by Irish writers in Greek translation, published by Vakxikon Publications in 2019. He has contributed to documentaries for BBC Radio Four, including We Will Arise and Go Now, and Driving Bill Drummond, and has featured on BBC Radio Three’s The Essay.

Stephen has performed his work at numerous venues in Ireland, the UK and international festivals in Athens, Boston, New York and San Francisco and he is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast.

(c) photo: ONIEB