Scott McKendry is a poet-critic and educator. He has published poems and reviews widely in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and was the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2019. His pamphlet, Curfuffle (The Lifeboat), was selected by the Poetry Book Society for their Autumn Choice in 2019. McKendry’s recently published first full collection, GUB (Little, Brown, 2024), has been well received by critics in Ireland and Great Britain.

Before taking up the post of Lecturer of Practice in AEL at QUB, McKendry was employed as a Government of Ireland Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2021–2023), working on a project comprising a study of Irish poetry exploring aesthetic discourse, literary networking and factionalism, canon-building, and the politics of cultural exclusivity within the northern tradition. He completed a doctoral project at Queen’s University Belfast funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, graduating in 2020. Following the completion of this thesis, which was awarded the Miss Margaret Cuthbert Frazer Research Bursary for research excellence in the field of dialect, McKendry continued research into uncelebrated northern writing and his interest in literary historiography and linguistic approaches to criticism. His chapter on nineteenth-century song, ‘Diamonds that on Rocks do Grow: Revision, Language and Memory in the Ballad “Belfast Mountains” (c. 1813–1820)’, was included in The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100–1850 (OUP, 2022).

McKendry has worked as a teaching assistant and occasional lecturer at undergraduate and postgraduate levels since 2016. He has led seminars on modules in Irish poetry, Irish working-class writing and contemporary fiction, and has convened a creative writing module at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. His primary role as Lecturer of Practice is co-ordinating and educating study abroad students in cultural immersion and academic writing. Guided by the principle of transmitting knowledge into communities and conveying local experience into the academy, he has been involved in several initiatives in conjunction with local community partners. In January 2024, he commenced a twelve-week community creative writing course, Find Your Voice @ Scríbhneoirí an tSléibhe, at Glór na Móna in West Belfast.