Poet in Residence, Niamh Twomey, Presents

Join us for an event presented by Belfast Book Festival’s Poet in Residence, Niamh Twomey.

The Residency, supported by The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, is an opportunity for an emergent voice to be recognised for their work and its promise.

Alongside time to write and time with mentor, Mícheál McCann, Niamh will also present a Festival event. 

Join Niamh in welcoming two poets whose debut collections confront life-altering experiences with honesty and courage. 

Molly Twomey’s Raised Among Vultures journeys through young adulthood, eating disorders, and family relationships with raw intensity. 

Emma Must’s The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday charts her environmental activism, legal battles and time in Holloway Prison as one of the ‘Twyford Seven’.

 
Together, these collections speak of survival, resistance, and active hope for a brighter future.

Niamh Twomey is a poet from Co. Clare and a current PhD student at Queen's University Belfast. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Channel, Cyphers, Banshee and The London Magazine, among others. She was awarded first prize in the 2025 Maria Edgeworth Poetry Competition, the 2023 Desmond O’Grady Poetry Competition and the 2022 Trim Poetry Competition. She participated in the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series in 2024. Her work focuses on ecology and the environmental crisis. 

Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. Her first collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and the Farmgate National Poetry Award. She was awarded the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and an Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2024 to work on her second collection, Chic to Be Sad, forthcoming in July 2025. 

Emma Must is a poet living in Belfast since 2011. Formerly a full-time environmental campaigner, in 2021 she completed a PhD in English (Creative Writing) at Queen’s University Belfast, focusing on ecopoetry. Her debut poetry collection, The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday (Valley Press), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023 and Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. Emma’s poem Toll won the Environmental Defenders Prize at the 2019 Ginkgo Awards. In 1995, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for Europe, for her efforts towards land conservation.

The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation aims to expand access to poetry and educational poetry materials, gathering outstanding poems from across places, eras, and traditions for audiences worldwide to enjoy. Click here to discover more about the Foundation.