EA (Archie) Markham, who was shortlisted for the TS Eliot poetry award in 2002 for his collection A Rough Climate, already has connections with Ireland as Writer in Residence at the University of Ulster from 1988 to 1991 - an experience that later inspired his book, Letter From Ulster And the Hugo Poems - and he was also Writer in Residence at Trinity College Dublin in 2006.

Glenn Patterson's 1988 debut novel, Burning Your Own, which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, saw the North falling apart through a 10-year-old boy's eyes. "With a child, everything is new, " he said in an interview with the Sunday Tribune at the time.

"You can get away from the weight of the over-documented past? With unemployment higher than anywhere in western Europe, Protestant and Catholic working class people were no different.

They were all victims of a society they had no say in." In his later novels - Fat Lad, The International and most recently That Which Was - Patterson developed a distinctive urban consciousness, which he explored through the interaction of history and memory with society.

Archie Markham has assumed a variety of identities - like masks - to avoid being stereotyped as a black writer, notably the persona of an angry inner-city workingclass Antiguan writer Paul St Vincent who came to live in London at the age of eight, but also that of Sally Goodman, a white middleclass Welsh feminist. His most recent genre-defying book, At Home With Miss Vanesa, was published last November, while his Selected Poems and a new collection, Rumours of Discontent, are due out this year.

The Hennessy Awards were established in 1971 to celebrate the best short stories published each year in the New Irish Writing Page edited by David Marcus in the Irish Press. The awards were expanded to include poetry when New Irish Writing moved to the Sunday Tribune in 1988, where it has been edited ever since by Ciaran Carty.

Annual awards are made in three categories, First Fiction, Emerging Fiction and Emerging Poetry. Each winner receives a trophy and Euro1,500. An overall New Irish Writer of the Year is chosen from the three category winners, receiving a further Euro2,500 and trophy. A Hall of Fame Award was introduced four years ago to honour the achievement of major writers who were first published in New Irish Writing or won Hennessy awards: its winners include Dermot Bolger, Joe O'Connor, Patrick McCabe and Colum McCann.

During the past year, many Hennessy writers have published novels and poetry collections, including Philip �? Ceallaigh's prizewinning Notes From A Turkish Whorehouse; Mary O'Donnell's outstanding new and selected poems, The Place of Miracle; Colum McCann's internationally acclaimed Zoli; John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which is to be filmed; Paul Perry's poems The Orchid Keeper; Peggy O'Brien's Writing Lough Derg; Micheal �? Conghaile's Jude Gaeilgeoi Deireanach Charna & Incubus (with Breandáin �? hEagra and Caitríona Ní Chonaola); Karen Gilleece's novel My Glass Heart;

and Martin Malone's The Lebanon Diaries; while Dermot Bolger followed up From These Green Heights, his 2004 Irish Times/ESB Best New Play, with a companion play, The Townlands of Brazil.

The New Irish Writing Page appears in the Sunday Tribune on the first Sunday of each month and is open to all writers either born or normally resident in Ireland. All stories and poems published are eligible for consideration for the Hennessy Awards.

Stories should not exceed 2,500 words. Stories and poems will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope.