Longford New Writing: The first multimedia submissions for 2026

A rolling call out has been made for people to submit prose / poetry / art / photography

This was the first time introducing art and photography to the submissions

Reporter:

Éimear Smith

05 Feb 2026 8:00 AM

Email:

eimear.smith@longfordleader.ie

Use the Arrows < > above to go through the submissions

Prose

Amnesia by Daniela Rana

The man flicks his cigarette down the grate, watching tendrils of blue smoke curl and disappear into the warm afternoon air,

and then the rain comes, heavier than it should be, washing the crushed cigarette and a supermarket plastic bag down the drain and out to the ocean where a passing turtle mistakes it for a jellyfish and swallows it whole,

and then a fisherman in a village pulls up his net and curses another day of nothing to bring home to his daughter who coughs in the heat of a fever that clings to her like a second skin,

and then in a city across the world a woman steps out of her office and into air so thick with smoke that her tongue is bitter with the taste of ash,

and then a boy wakes in the night to the sound of sirens because the river has risen again, swallowing streets and homes and the place where he used to play soccer,

and then an old farmer kneels in a cracked field, running dry soil through his fingers, scarcely remembering the years when the rains came on time and the wheat grew tall and golden,

and then in another town a mother carries her baby through floodwaters, the current pulling at her legs as she whispers a prayer in a forgotten language,

and then far away on what was once solid ice a polar bear paws through the water searching for land that no longer exists,

and then in the heat of a distant winter, long after the last glacier had wept itself into the sea and drooled its apologies to the drowning islands it could no longer save, a child asks his grandfather if it is true that the world had once been cold, that the snow had once powdered down from the sky like sugar, that the barren earth had once been lush and fertile and borne fruit trees of every kind, that animals could indeed be fruitful and multiply, that the birds had filled morning skies with fluttered notes of hope and weightless song, and the old man closes his eyes and replies, "it must have been paradise."

Biography:

Daniela Rana is a 21-year-old Longford-based writer and radio journalist at Shannonside FM and Newstalk radio in Dublin. She loves writing fiction and hopes to publish a book one day.

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