We are delighted that Tara Bergin has been awarded the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Full Collection Prize for her poetry debut This is Yarrow. The £1,000 Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best first collection published in the UK or Ireland in the preceding year, and Bergin's win was announced last night as part of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Summer School at Queen's University Belfast.

The Chairman of the judges this year was Professor Ciaran Carson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. His fellow judges were Professor Paul Farley, Lancaster University and Professor Paula Meehan, Ireland Chair of Poetry. They said, 'This year's Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for a First Collection of Poems attracted a large number of powerful and accomplished submissions. The books sent for consideration displayed in abundance the health, wealth and variety of the art of poetry as it is currently practised in these islands, and the judges found the process of arriving at a shortlist exhilarating and difficult in equal measure. We congratulate the authors of these books, and the presses for making them public.'

The poems in Tara Bergin’s debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous energy, a troubled state of mind.

As the winner, Bergin will be reading at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University for the annual Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry.

Also shortlisted for the prize was fellow Carcanet poet Rory Waterman with Tonight the Summer's Over.

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. She moved to England in 2002. In 2012 she completed her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky.