The Charles Causley Trust recently announced the winner of its 2018 International Poetry Competition, which was judged by Sir Andrew Motion.

The Charles Causley International Poetry Prize comes from the The Charles Causley Trust, which preserves Charles Causley’s poetic legacy, by creating opportunities for writers and communities to develop and connect through a programme of residencies, competitions and events.

This prestigious poetry award is made annually and this year’s winning poem was ‘Tasting Notes’ by Judy O’Kane from Ballymena in Northern Ireland. Judy won £2,000 plus a week’s writing residency at Cyprus Well, Charles Causley’s former home in Launceston.

Judy is a prose writer and poet. She worked the wine harvest in St Estèphe, Bordeaux on sabbatical from legal partnership in Dublin and her work explores terroir, wine’s sense of place.

In 2017 she won the National Memory Day Prize and the Irish Post Prize, and was prize winner at Wells Festival of Literature and Guernsey Literary Festival. In 2015 she won the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize.

Thirst, her non-fiction work-in-progress, was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Award for best un-commissioned first biography. The judges described the work as ‘a quest in many registers, and a celebration of the mystery of wine.

‘Written with verve and insight, it’s a very modern form of memoir, and one that leads its readers into many different worlds along the way’. An extract, The Drawing Room, was published by the Manchester Review in December 2017.

Judy holds an LL.B from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Life Writing from UEA, where she is completing a PhD in Creative and Critical writing. She teaches advocacy at the Law Society of Dublin.

In his feedback on the shortlisted entries, Sir Andrew Motion said: “It was a pleasure to read the shortlisted poems: they covered a wide range of subjects, were set in an interesting variety of places, and had a pleasing variety of tone. The pieces I liked best were those in which a definite structure (of narrative or syntax) combined with a clear-eyed recovery of the present or the past.

“Also, given that all the poems were more-or-less conversational in tone and style, I felt most drawn to those which added something startling to intensify or disturb.”

A spokesperson for the Causley Trust said: “We were delighted by the number of high-quality entries received in the 2018 competition confirming the prestigious nature of this annual poetry event and maintaining Charles Causley’s name on the international stage. We look forward to welcoming Judy O’Kane to Cyprus Well for her residency and hope that aspiring writers in Launceston and beyond will enter the 2019 competition, which will be launched in the summer.”

Full details of all the poems can be found on the website, www.causleytrust.org