Leontia Flynn

I have published four poetry collections with Jonathan Cape: These Days (2004), Drives (2008) Profit and Loss (2011) and The Radio (2017).  These have won an Eric Gregory Award, The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Rooney Prize for Irish Writing, a Major Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council NI, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, the AWB Vincent Literary Award and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. After my first book I was selected as one of twenty 'Next Generation poets' by the Poetry Book Society i association with the Guardian newspaper, and I have been nominated for the Costa Poetry Prize and (twice) for the T S Eliot Prize. I have also published two pamphlets of poetry:  Slim New Book, twenty-five Catullus versions, was published by Lifeboat Press in 2020, and Nina Simone is Singing was published by Mariscat in 2021, and nominated for the Michael Marks award.  A fifth collection with Jonathan Cape, Taking Liberties, is forthcoming in 2023.

I publish poetry in contemporary journals in Ireland, the U.K., including Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, the LRB and the TLS,  and sometimes contribute to radio broadcasts on poetry.  My poetry has been translated, more regularly into French, and is collected in anthologies of contemporary poetry. I’ve travelled widely to give readings at literary festivals and events both nationally and internationally.  I have written essays on my own writing for The Edinburgh Review and The Irish University Review, and I edited five issues of the poetry journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby.

My interests are, overexcitedly, in almost all aspects of poetry, both contemporary and historical, but particularly form and inspiration, money and technology, motherhood and the work of female artists. My Masters degree was in writing and cultural politics, with a focus on feminist theory, and I have also published a monograph, Reading Medbh McGuckian (Irish Academic Press), about Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian.

I am involved in the teaching within the English subject area at undergraduate level and primarily postgraduate level. I lecture on Introduction to Creative Writing, and supervise third year poetry dissertations. On the MA in Poetry: Creativity and Criticism, I convene and teach the module Form in Poetry, and teach on The Poetry Collection, The Poetry Workshop and the MA poetry dissertation module.  I act as principal supervisor to PhDs in poetry and creative writing and have supervised several PhDs to completion.

‘agonised, gabby, curt, meditative, cruel (and self-lacerating, too), smart and smarting, funny and, when she tells them, serious about the butts of her jokes…  The Radio is an outstanding book from a poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation’. John McAuliffe, Irish Times.

‘Leontia Flynn’s The Radio is a brilliant and challenging collection, a set of poems that truly cuts beneath the skin – she is, to use that ever-golden phrase, a poet approaching the peak of her powers’.Kevin Barry, The Irish Times Summer Reading

‘Our grandparents warned us of the existential dread that the modern world would eventually bring to us, and in her book The Radio, Leontia Flynn gathers those anxieties and weaves them into a tapestry of contemporary lyric drama. The poems are chaotic and finely tuned. They are love in the time of LOL. They swear and pray and grapple with our fear of losing our humanity—or our fear of humanity. Flynn drives us with tech-driven poems that we recognize intimately as features of contemporary Earth’. Sarah Warren, World Literature Today

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/05/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup.