The Ireland Chair of Poetry and HOWL New Irish Writing are delighted to launch the winning pamphlets of Ben Keatinge and Rafael Mendes. 
'The two chosen manuscripts use the scope of the pamphlet deftly. Through interconnected poems, they reach beyond Ireland to explore – both explicitly and implicitly – our understanding of identities in flux.'— The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
 
'Ben Keatinge’s Waiting for Goran at the Broz Café immerses us in the past and present of Eastern Europe, attentive to its landscapes and histories in a way that resonates with our renewed sense of the volatility of the region. In their formal versatility these poems draw attention to the boundaries of language and allegiance – ‘borders / based on the shifting, burning / facts on the ground’. History puts pressure on utterance in these poems, reminding us of the limits of knowledge and the importance of what remains unspoken.' —The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
 
Ben Keatinge was born in Dublin in 1973 and educated at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2022 and received a Dedalus Press Poetry Mentorship in 2021. His poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, and anthologies. From 2007 to 2016, he worked as a university lecturer, teaching English literature in North Macedonia while studying Macedonian and travelling extensively. He was also an International Research Fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest in 2015. Many of his poems are inspired by the history and cultures of the Balkans.