Kenmare | Arts Festival | 2025
3 to 17 August 2025
Thank you for supporting the Kenmare Arts Festival 2025.
This year’s festival was a tremendous success thanks to your enthusiasm, creativity, and generosity.
Over 100 paintings brightened local businesses, five Carnegie events drew excellent audiences, and our first Short Story Competition filled the hall. Mill Cove Gallery awarded €2,500 in prizes, and all 14 workshops were fully booked with wonderful feedback.
In total, more than 290 artists, writers, and poets took part, and over 2,000 people attended events and openings—plus countless visitors who enjoyed the town-wide art display.
Your support made this possible.
Here’s to an even bigger, better, more inclusive Kenmare Arts Festival 2026
John Goode
Festival Director, 2025
The Kenmare Short Story Prize 2026 invites original short fiction from writers in Ireland and beyond. We’re seeking compelling work that speaks to lived experience—memory, identity, resilience, community, loss, joy, displacement, or belonging. Stories may be intimate or expansive, traditional or experimental, so long as they engage the reader with clarity and emotional truth.
A shortlist of entries will be published in our annual anthology, with winning and commended writers invited to read at the 2026 Kenmare Arts Festival. Submissions open on 9 February 2026 and close on 30 May 2026.
