€100,000 Fedora Prize for Contemporary Opera Names 2025 Recipient

Irish composer Michael Gallen has won the prize for his opera "The Curing Line," due for premiere in 2026

Irish composer Michael Gallen has been selected as the 2025 winner of the Fedora Prize for his opera The Curing Line. Awarded every second year, the €100,000 prize for contemporary opera is given out by a panel of judges including the directors of the Paris Opera, Dutch National Opera, Danish National Theatre, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

Set in an Irish border town during the Troubles, The Curing Line explores Ireland's indigenous traditions of "making cures," and Gallen and his team did extensive ethnographic research by interviewing people from Irish, Mincéir, and immigrant backgrounds who have experience with these traditions.

The work's principal themes are healing, interconnectivity, the loss of culture, and the ever-present problem of environmental collapse, and the opera will receive its premiere at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2026.

A composer, writer, director, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, Michael Gallen has received commissions from Radio France, the Orchestre National de Bretagne, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Ulster Orchestra. He is Artistic Director of the Irish opera company Straymaker, which also produced his 2019 opera Elsewhere, an exploration of the 1919 Monaghan Asylum Soviet.

"For our independent, artist-led work to be selected as the winner of the award gives us a huge rush of affirmation that will carry us forward not just with this project but with all of our future plans and ambitions," Gallen said at the ceremony.

"Here and now, the global world is experiencing a turbulent and rather chaotic time," said jury chair Birgitta Svendén. "The theme for The Curing Line is more relevant than ever. What can we do as individuals, as communities, what can we learn from history and inherited traditions, how can we acknowledge the change we have to go through without losing hope for the future generations?"

"The Curing Line will address many of the questions that we as human beings are faced with and do not have the answers for. This project is deeply immersive and multi-sensorial which gives the possibility to expand the boundaries of opera. The narrative, the musical language and the staging will resonate to the audience of tomorrow."