25 April,
Panel / Poetry /
Poetry Reading: Dean Browne, Matthew Rice, Kandace Siobhan Walker
Saturday, 25 April 2026, 2:30pm
Galway Arts Centre – Nuns Island Theatre / €10/12
Book NowWe are delighted to welcome three remarkable poets to Cúirt. Their work explores the boundaries, absurdities and humour of modern life.
In Dean Browne’s debut, After Party, we encounter a mesmeric teller of surreal poems that test the boundaries of contemporary poetry. A leg sets off on a long train journey; a Parisian alley cat is launched into space; earthbound lovers attempt to connect while their inner lives prove unbridgeable.
Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, Matthew Rice’s plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet. This collection moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.
Kandace Siobhan Walker’s debut Cowboy is knowing, millennial and funny, with currents of spirituality, familial mythology, grief and longing. Asking the question, where does a person grow up? and moving restlessly between rural Wales, London, the American South, and esoteric spaces of the internet.
In association with the Welsh Government
Dean received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2020 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Recent poems have appeared in London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His first collection After Party is published by Picador. He is writer in residence at University College Cork.
Matthew was born in Belfast. Poems have appeared in Granta, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Guardian, BOMB magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Dark Horse, and in anthologies The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear), Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press / University of Chicago Press), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber). He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and a PhD from The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, where he has taught Introduction to Creative Writing. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press) was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year. His latest book is plastic, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). He is currently the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at The Seamus Heaney Centre.
Kandace Siobhan s a writer and artist. She is the author of Kaleido (Bad Betty Press, 2022) and Cowboy (CHEERIO, 2023). She has received an Eric Gregory Award, The White Review Poet’s Prize and a Wales Book of the Year Award. Her latest installation Dreamerism (2024) appeared in Jerwood’s nationally touring exhibition Survey III. She is the 2025-26 Virgil Abloh Scholar at the Royal College of Art. She lives in South London.
