Today in our poetry news round-up, we look at the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, the new recording of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry and the death of the literary agent who championed Jack Kerouac.

Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards

The Dorothea Mackellar poetry awards are the biggest poetry competition for schools in Australia, and also the longest-running ones. A tiny school located in the town of Urbenville in New South Wales has taken not one but two of the coveted awards this year. This is no mean achievement for the public school, which has only 21 students and just two teachers: the principal and his wife.

The school won their awards in the primary school category, and one of their year 5 students also won an award for his poem.

The primary school category featured entries from 800 schools, the judges said that it was very unusual for such a small school to walk away from the competition with two awards. The primary school section of the competition receives in the region of 4000 poems to look at, there are just two judges, so this is a rather large task.

The school is no stranger to winning competitions. One of their five-year-old students was also named the winner of an inter-school competition which took place locally. She won with her rendition of AA Milne’s “Now We Are Six”.

Celebrities Read Poet’s Work for New Album

A number of Irish celebrities, including U2’s Bono, will be featuring in a poetry reading of works by the late Patrick Kavanagh as part of “Almost Everything”, a new album that is to be released at the end of September.

The album has been created as a two-part collection that will include recordings by a total of 15 different famous Irish figures. Each one will be reciting poems by Kavanagh to a musical soundtrack. The album has been planned as a remastered version of the poet’s own “Almost Everything”, which was recorded in 1964 and featured the voice of Kavanagh himself.

“On Raglan Road”, which is possibly the most famous of the poet’s works, will kick off the album and will be read by Bono and will start the album. Some of the other names who will be contributing their voices to the album include the Irish president Michael D. Higgins, Actors Aisling Bea, Liam Neeson, Aidan Gillen and Evanna Lynch and Singers Christy Moore, Imelda May and Sharon Corr.

Kavanagh began writing in the 1930s and was well known for his depictions of life in everyday Ireland which were rather unsentimental. He died aged 63 in 1967.

Sterling Lord Dies aged 102

The literary agent Sterling Lord, who worked for years to get Jack Kerouac published, has died at the age of 102.

Having started his own agency in 1952, he was an ambassador for The Beats, the revolutionary cultural movement that not only included Kerouac but also Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was also an agent for novelist Ken Kesey and poet Amiri Baraka.

He continued working for the literary agency he founded until he was 100 when he left to form another agency.

He died of natural causes attributed to old age. He leaves behind a daughter.