Supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery funding, these awards, worth £15,000 each, are the highest value honour bestowed on artists in Northern Ireland each year and are given in recognition of the contribution each artist has made to creative life in Northern Ireland.

Gail McConnell is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in the living and the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities of language and form. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, two poetry pamphlets – Fothermather and Fourteen – and made two arts features based on her poetry and one on Seamus Heaney for BBC Radio 4.

Gail will use the Major Individual Artist Award to work on a non-fiction project about formative experiences of evangelicalism braided into family, education, The Troubles and its aftermath.