Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: In-Conversation and Poetry Reading

About Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942, educated there and at Oxford before spending her working life as an academic in Trinity College, Dublin. She was a founding member of Cyphers, a literary journal. She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute which called her “among the very best poets of her generation”, the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 1573 International Poetry Award, one of China’s highest literary honours.

The Gallery Press has been publishing her work for fifty years and her collections include Acts and Monuments (1972, winner of the 1973 Patrick Kavanagh Award), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977, 1986), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Brazen Serpent (1994), Then Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), Selected Poems (2008), The Sun-fish (2009, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009 and winner of the 2010 Griffin International Poetry Prize), Legend of the Walled-up Wife (translations from the Romanian of Ileana Malancioiu, 2011), The Boys of Bluehill (2015) and The Mother House (2019, winner of the 2020 Irish Times Poetry Now Award). Her Collected Poems was published in October 2020 and was winner of The Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ Week in 2021. Second Voyages (Writers on poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) was presented to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin on the occasion of her 80th birthday in November 2022. The Map of the World, published in September 2023, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and winner of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. Published in 2024 was a new, revised edition of Cork which was first published in 1977 with poems by Eileen Ní Chuilleanáin and drawings by Brian Lalor. September 2025 sees the publication of her New Selected Poems.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was married to the award-winning poet, Macdara Woods, who died in 2018.

Following this special event Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin will do book signings: to order her collection “New Selected Poems” go to Gallery Press, The ICC will be selling some of Eiléan’s poetry books at this event.

About Dorothy Allen

Dorothy Allen is an award winning journalist, currently the London correspondent of Swiss magazine Tierwelt. She is a former BBC reporter, working in documentary programmes for television (Brass Tacks; Panorama) and radio (File on Four). As a print journalist, she won a Feature Writer of the Year award while reporting for the Burton Daily Mail. She has also written a weekly television review column for The Tablet magazine. Dorothy is a former Vice Chair of the Irish Literary Society. Dorothy is also a key member of the ICC Irish Literature Programming team.