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Join us at Kee’s Hotel, Stranorlar, as the 2026 Frances Browne Literary Festival officially begins. Four days of readings, workshops, music, theatre and celebration start here.

Cllr Patrick McGowan of Donegal County Council will address the gathering, and festival guest Jennifer Leong, from Singapore, will speak about Timelines, a new collaborative book due in 2027.

Timelines is a 100-page collaboration in which ten artists and poets from Ireland and Singapore respond to one another through alternating paintings and poems. It is being created by Jennifer Leong, Chan Choy Har and Celine McGlynn.

The launch also marks the presentation of the 2026 Frances Browne Award to Selwyn Glynn, beamed all the way from New Zealand with Professor Thomas McLean making the presentation. Professor McLean, of the University of Otago, is a long-standing friend of the festival, received the award himself in 2024, and is currently preparing an edition of Frances Browne’s Legends of Ulster.

Printed copies of the programme will be available on the day.

This is a free event and everyone is welcome.

Presenters/ Performers

Cllr Patrick McGowan. Cathaoirleach of Lifford Stranorlar MD, Donegal County Council.

Jennifer Leong, poet, Singapore

Jennifer Leong is a Pushcart Prize-nominated Singaporean poet who began writing in 2021 to raise funds for autism causes, and invented the DuaTresPentaStep poetic form. Her poem Hills won the Spirit of the Festival Award here in 2022. She co-founded the multilingual showcase NoesisConverseNation at National Gallery Singapore.

Selwyn Glynn, 2026 Frances Browne Award recipient

Professor Thomas McLean Thomas McLean is Professor in English at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (2010) and author of The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (2012). With Ruth Knezevich, he co-edited Jane Porter’s 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw for Edinburgh University Press (2019). He is currently preparing an edition of Frances Browne’s Legends of Ulster. A long-standing friend of the festival, Professor McLean received the Frances Browne Award in 2024 and has travelled to Ireland for the festival in both 2024 and 2025.

Sponsors

The Frances Browne award is kindly sponsored by Karen Murphy School of Speech and Drama.

Festival sponsors: Donegal County Council and the Finn Valley Voice.

About the Frances Browne Literary Festival

The Frances Browne Literary Festival celebrates the life and legacy of Frances Browne (1816 to 1879), the "Blind Poetess of Ulster". Rooted in her hometown of Ballybofey-Stranorlar, Co. Donegal, the festival brings together poets, writers, musicians and communities from Ireland and beyond to share in her spirit of creativity, inclusion and multilingual expression.

Frances Browne is the most important writer to emerge from Donegal’s Finn Valley. Her masterpiece, the children’s storybook Granny’s Wonderful Chair, was a bestseller all over the world, but she also deserves to be remembered for her unswerving opposition to slavery and all sorts of injustice. The festival works to bring Frances’s writing and astonishing life story to new generations, and to celebrate contemporary writers who continue in her tradition.

Full programme and festival information: www.francesbrowneliteraryfestival.com