Award-Winning Debut Coming Soon
Taxidermy Heart
April 23rd @ Cork City Library, 5 p.m.
Taxidermy Heart — winner of the 2023 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, and the searing debut poetry chapbook by Lauren O’Donovan — launches at Cork World Book Festival 2025. Launched by acclaimed poet Molly Twomey, this special event explores the power and precision of the chapbook form, and celebrates the arrival of an urgent and unforgettable voice in Irish poetry.
Taxidermy Heart is a collection that pulses with intensity — a work that interrogates love, loss, and the complicated terrain of daughterhood and motherhood with raw elegance.
Free event. All welcome.
“The poems that comprise this chapbook are wild, guttural, and unforgettable. O'Donovan's literary scalpel dissects the dark and uncomfortable parts of the heart with precision and considerable skill.”
— Victoria Kennefick on Taxidermy Heart
“As all poets should hope to, Lauren O'Donovan earns our trust. her craft is unimpeachable, but what most impresses is the earned, persuasive, wisdom of the heart that rings through in poem after poem. I salute a remarkable debut.”
— Theo Dorgan on Taxidermy Heart
Superposition
May 17th @ Cork Arts Theatre, 3 p.m.
Lauren O’Donovan’s second chapbook, Superposition, winner of the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, will be launched at the Cork International Poetry Festival this May. Published by Southword Editions, Superposition is a collection alive with tension, tenderness, and intellectual clarity — where quantum mechanics and the intimate realities of family life intersect in surprising and powerful ways.
Following the Patrick Kavanagh Award-winning debut Taxidermy Heart, this new work confirms O’Donovan as one of the most compelling emerging voices in Irish poetry.
This launch reading forms part of the Fool for Poetry & Gregory O’Donoghue Prize Readings at Cork Arts Theatre. Tickets €5 from munsterlit.ie.
All welcome.
“Keenly attuned to the natural world and full of wit, philosophy, and hard-won wisdom, O'Donovan's poems are ones you will want to spend time reading and re-reading.”
— Jessica Traynor on Superposition
“Superposition does something new in Irish poetry by seamlessly incorporating scientific thought in a way which does not corrupt or make awkward the language. O'Donovan's observations lead to wonderful, original descriptions a seasoned, hungry reader can savour.”
— Patrick Cotter on Superposition
About Lauren
Lauren O’Donovan is an Irish writer. She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Southword Subscriber’s Poetry Prize and, most recently, the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition. She is co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing and Lime Square Poets, and is a grateful recipient of funding from Cork County Council and the Arts Council. Lauren is fortunate to have her work sometimes published in journals and anthologies, most recently in Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Scotland, and Banshee. She lives in County Cork with her family.
