Biographies

	Alan Gillis was born in Belfast in 1973. His first book of poetry, Somebody, Somewhere, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2005, and won The Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland. His second book, Hawks and Doves, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2007 and was also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University of Belfast. Previously a lecturer in Irish Literature at the University of Ulster, he currently teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Ciaran Carson has written: ‘The poems are often gloriously funny, formally brilliant, jinking deftly between streetwise talk and mordant rhetoric. Somebody, Somewhere is one of the best books of poetry I have read for some time.’
	Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942 and lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician, a mature student and a teacher of English. He has published five collections of short stories and four novels. His debut novel Lamb (1980) was made into a film starring Liam Neeson. Cal (1983) was also made into a film featuring Helen Mirren. MacLaverty’s third novel Grace Notes (1997) won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. On his most recent collection of short stories, Matters of Life and Death (2006), the New Statesman commented: ‘In a book bursting with reasons for praise, MacLaverty's ability to do what Chekhov does is the most praiseworthy of all.’
	Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1988. His first novel Burning Your Own (1988) won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Subsequent novels include Fat Lad (1992), The International (1999), Number 5 (2003) and That Which Was (2004). His most recent books include the non-fiction Lapsed Protestant (2006), a novel set in Japan entitled The Third Party (2007) and the historical fiction Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times (2008). In 2005 he was elected to Aosdána, which recognizes artists whose work made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland, and last year he was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He is a member of Aosdána, and he teaches Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.
	Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow in 1944 and is part of the wider Irish diaspora within Scotland; his father was from Dublin and his maternal grandmother was from Newry. He burst onto the poetry scene in the 1960s with ‘Six Glasgow Poems’, a sequence of dialect poems that would radically alter the terrain of post-war Scottish literature. His major poetry is collected in several volumes: Intimate Voices (1984), Reports from the Present (1995), access to the silence (2004) and, most recently, outside the narrative (2009). He has also written Places of the Mind (1993) a study of the life and work the Scottish poet James Thomson and is editor of Radical Renfrew (1990), a ground-breaking anthology of nineteenth century Scottish poetry. In the Poetry Review Peter Manson writes; ‘[Leonard’s poems] speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with.’ He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow.
	Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942. She is has been publishing poetry for over four decades and her books include Acts and Monuments (1972), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Brazen Serpent (1994) and The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001). She is also a translator of poetry from other languages, and she learned Romanian to undertake After the Raising of Lazarus, (2005), her translations of the poems of Ileana Malancioiu. Her own poetry has been translated into other languages, most notably into Italian and into Polish. Her many awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and the O'Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute, an honour which placed Chuilleanáin 'among the very best poets of her generation.' A new Gallery Press / Faber retrospective collection underlines her status as a major literary figure. Seamus Heaney has written: ‘There is something second-sighted about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's work. Her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light.’ With her husband, the poet Macdara Woods, and with Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson, she was a founder editor of the long-standing journal Cyphers, which remains at the forefront of Irish literary reviews. She is a member of Aosdána, and Professor of English Literature and a Fellow at Trinity College in Dublin where she teaches Renaissance literature.
	Maurice Harmon was educated at University College Dublin and at Harvard University. He is Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD where he developed undergraduate and graduate programmes in Irish studies and was an influential and distinguished teacher for many years. He is a scholar of international stature, former President of IASIL and has published widely on Samuel Becket, James Joyce, J.M. Synge, Austin Clarke, Mary Lavin, Sean O’Faolain, Thomas Kinsella and others . He was the founder and editor for almost twenty years of the foremost journal in Irish studies – the Irish University Review. His anthology Irish Poetry after Yeats had a defining influence as did his guide to Irish studies –Select Bibliography for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature and its Backgrounds. Maurice Harmon is also a poet whose three collections The Last Regatta (2000), The Doll with Two Backs (2004), and The Mischievous Boy (2008) have been widely acclaimed. His translation of Accalam na Senorach, a medieval compendium of stories and poems, has just been published.