Conor O’Callaghan

Conor O’Callaghan was born in Newry, County Down, in 1968, and grew up in Dundalk, County Louth.

He has published  five collections with The Gallery Press, The History of Rain (1993, shortlisted for the Forward ‘Best First Collection’ Prize and won the Patrick Kavanagh Award), Seatown (1999), Fiction (2005,  a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The Sun King (2013, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) and Live Streaming (2017).

He has been director of the annual Poetry Now Festival in Dun Laoghaire (2000-2003) and writer-in-residence at University College Dublin and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. He was co-holder of the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies, Villanova University (2004) and from 2005-2010 was poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Apart from poetry, Conor has written widely on sport. His radio documentary on cricket in Ireland, ‘The Season’, was produced by Dick Warner in 1996 and has been repeated several times. A further essay, ‘Jolly Good Shot Old Boy’, appeared in the anthology Playing the Field: Eleven Irish Writers on Sport (New Island, 2000). ‘One-One’, his comic prose memoir of the public furore surrounding Ireland’s involvement in the 2002 football World Cup that appeared in The Dublin Review, eventually became the book Red Mist — Roy Keane and the Football Civil War (Bloomsbury 2004), which in turn was adapted by Eamon Little to a one-hour film — part documentary, part animation — for Setanta TV in 2007.

Conor O’Callaghan lives in Sheffield and currently divides his time between Sheffield and Dublin.