Tyrone school among winners of all-island Poetry Aloud poetry speaking competition

Alice Mackle was named as Overall winner and also winner of the competition’s Junior category.

Alice’s mum Blaithin Mackle and members of her family attended the prize-giving ceremony.

Organised by the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and Poetry Ireland, and supported by UCC, the competition for 2021, in which students spoke a number of different poems, took place virtually because of the pandemic, but the winners were presented with their prizes in person in the surroundings of the WB Yeats Library at the NLI.

The competition has been putting poetry to the forefront of students’ minds since 2007. It has three categories: junior, intermediate, and senior. At today’s ceremony in the National Library of Ireland, the students each spoke a poem of their own choosing: Tirzah Hutchinson Edgar selected WB Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’; Charley Fitzgerald selected DH Lawrence’s ‘Piano’; Jake O’Loughlin chose Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’; and Alice Mackle chose ‘All the World’s a Stage’, by William Shakespeare.

The winner is presented with the Poetry Aloud trophy. Students are presented with cash prizes and each winning school receives €300 in book tokens for their school library.

Bríd O’Sullivan of the NLI’s Exhibitions, Learning & Programming Department said: “Poetry is a most wonderful art form and Poetry Aloud aims to celebrate poetry speaking and understanding among second-level students.”