Judy O’Kane. past Ballymaloe Cookery School Student, award winning poet and prose writer, is very excited to be returning to her alma mater to read her work and talk about her inspiration from Ballymaloe and beyond.

Judy’s poetry began to take shape in The Rocket House, Ballycotton where she lived for three months as a student at Ballymaloe. Much of her writing arises from imagery harvested from food and wine. Her work explores terroir, a sense of place in its widest sense, or as Mrs. Allen wrote, ‘that field always made good butter’.

Judy is very excited to be returning to the school to read her work and talk about her inspiration from Ballymaloe and beyond.

About Judy…

Judy is an Irish poet and prose writer. She began writing from the Rocket House in Ballycotton as a Ballymaloe student, while on sabbatical from legal partnership. She worked the ’09 harvest in St Estèphe and her work explores place, food and terroir, wine’s sense of place in its broadest sense.

Judy has won the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the National Memory Day Prize, the Irish Post Prize and the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. Her poetry is published in The World of Fine Wine, Landfall and The North.

Thirst, her non-fiction work-in-progress, was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Award. The judges described the work as ‘a quest in many registers, and a celebration of the mystery of wine’. An extract, The Drawing Room, was published by the Manchester Review in December 2017.

Judy has read at The House of Lords, The Irish Writers in London Summer School and Ballymaloe LitFest. Her work has been displayed at Guernsey Poetry on the Move festival. Judy is a member of the Circle of Wine Writers and holds the Wine and Spirits Education Trust Diploma. She holds an LL.B from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Life Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she recently completed a PhD in Creative and Critical writing. She teaches advocacy at the Law Society of Dublin.