Kavanagh Weekend 2026

25th-27th September

inniskeen

The Patrick Kavanagh Centre in association with the Patrick Kavanagh Society and SoFFt Productions are delighted to announce the Kavanagh Weekend 2026. This year, the festival collaborates with the curatorial team ‘Unreal Cities’ (Adrian Dunbar and Nick Roth) to present an exciting programme exploring Patrick Kavanagh's links to the Beat Generation literary movement of the 20th Century. The Kavanagh Weekend 2026 coincides with global celebrations honouring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg. This curation will play host to an exciting mix of voices including a number of artists directly associated with the movement, such as poet Anne Waldman.

We are delighted to announce the first of this year's programme; Our annual opening night event will return on Friday 25th September with this year’s Festival Keynote from the formidable Poet, professor, performer, librettist and cultural activist Anne Waldman alongside one of Ireland's greatest Actors, Writer and Director Adrian Dunbar.

The evening will also see the announcement of the 54th annual Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award by this year’s adjudicator, acclaimed poet Victoria Kennefick. Since its inception in 1971, the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award has been a crucial milestone for emerging Irish poets on their journey towards recognition and publication. The opening night event will take place in The Round Tower Church, Inniskeen.

Once complete the audience will be invited to participate in a Procession of Light led by The Armagh Rhymers through the village all the way to The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, wherein a late night concert will take place; Unreal Cities presents “Kavanagh and The Beats”.

On Saturday 26th September the festival will play host to a conversation that promises to be anything but ordinary. Tommy Tiernan, Ireland's beloved comedian, actor, podcaster and chat show host meets Anne Waldman, Nick Roth and Adrian Dunbar.

This is only the beginning. The full programme will launch in July.

Tickets on sale now for the opening night events and Tommy Tiernan in conversation. We are also delighted to announce The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is now open for entries. Head to the website to find out more.

More information

Opening Events ticket details

Kavanagh Poetry Award 2026 and Festival Keynote

Friday 25th September 2026
Round Tower Church
Doors: 7pm (guests required to be seated by 7.30pm)
Ticket Price:€15.00

book here
Kavanagh and the Beats

Friday 25th September 2026
Patrick Kavanagh Centre
Doors: 9.30pm, Show: 9.45pm
Ticket Price: €20.00

Book here
Tommy Tiernan in Conversation

Saturday 26th September 2026
Patrick Kavanagh Centre
Doors: 7.30pm, Show: 8pm
Ticket Price: €35.00

Book here

About the Artists

Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of MESOPOTOPIA, Penguin 2025, Archivist Scissors, Staircase 2025, Bard, Kinetic, 2023, a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, 2022. The Grammy-nominated Burroughs-ian opera Black Lodge with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022.Waldman recently collaborated on a sonic poetry album called "Your Devotee in Rags" with Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene (Siren Recordings, 2025).

Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for poetry. She is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St Marks Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program.

The film about Anne Waldman OUTRIDER directed by Alystyre Julian, and produced by Tamaas Foundation, and executive producer Martin Scorsese premiered at Anthology Film Archives in April 2025 and is traveling the world.

Photography by Nina Subin.

Victoria Kennefick

Dr Victoria Kennefick is a poet and writer based in Tralee, Co. Kerry. Her debut poetry collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. She was an Arts Council of Ireland/UCD Writer in Residence and Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo in 2023. In 2024, she was Cork County Council Arts Office Writer in Residence. Last year she was appointed as the Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow and a Poet in Residence at the Queensland Writers Centre, Brisbane. She is a current ROOTS Creative Artist in Residence at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee.

Photography by Pauline Dennigan.

Unreal Cities

Unreal Cities is a multi-disciplinary arts project, founded by actor/director Adrian Dunbar and saxophonist/composer Nick Roth.

The company follows an ethos centred on the power of three, with each piece the meeting point of three disciplines - as in William Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's The Third Mind, it is the inclusion of an other that advances the work. Projects to date include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (2015), Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things (2019), Dermot Healy's A Fool's Errand (2024) and Sean Scully's Tree for Godot (2025), with performances including the Hay Festival, London Jazz Festival (Queen Elizabeth Hall) and the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt.

In association with the Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, Unreal Cities curate the Beckett Biennale programme of theatre, dance, music, film, photography and discussion. The inaugural Beckett: Confined took place in Liverpool in 2022, Beckett: Unbound took place in Liverpool / Paris in 2024 and the third edition Beckett: Lieben takes place in 2026.

In September 2026 Unreal Cities curate the Kavanagh Weekend, exploring the impact of Patrick Kavanagh's encounter with the Beat Poets, in a festival programme that includes poet Anne Waldman, the Armagh Rhymers, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, led by Bachir Attar.

Photography by Alex Bonney.