Belfast Book Festival

Don’t miss an evening with two of Ireland’s leading and most accomplished poetic voices at the apex of their careers: Tara Bergin, who was born in Dublin, and Leontia Flynn, born in County Down in the same year. These acclaimed poets will trace their respective touchstones, and their anxieties of influence, with the eminent poet-translator Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. Her first collection of poems, This is Yarrow (Carcanet), was awarded the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the 2014 Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. Her second collection The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet, 2017) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her third book is Savage Tales, published by Carcanet in 2022. She now lives in the North of England and teaches part-time on the creative writing programme at Newcastle University.

Leontia Flynn has published four collections of poetry with Jonathan Cape, most recently The Radio (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Irish Times Poetry Prize. The Lifeboat Press published her pamphlet of Catullus translations, Slim New Book, in 2020 and Mariscat published her pamphlet Nina Simone is Singing in 2021. She lives in Belfast.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and a member of Aosdána. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-2019. In 2010, she was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize, and in 2020 China’s 1573 International Poetry Award. Her many translations of poetry include Dánta Antonella Anedda [translations from Italian into Irish] Cois Life (2019), Verbale/Minutes/Tuairisc, with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin and Gabriel Rosenstock, from the Italian of Michele Ranchetti, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, (2002), The Water Horse with Medbh McGuckian, from the Irish of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Gallery Press (2000), 21 poems by Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, in Leabhar na hAthgabhála ed. Louis de Paor, Cló Iar-Chonachta (2016), After the Raising of Lazarus, from the Romanian of Ileana Mălăncioiu, Munster Literature Centre (2005), and Legend of the Walled-up Wife, from the Romanian of Ileana Mălăncioiu, Gallery (2011). 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), The 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), 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 won the Pigott Prize 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.