Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Irish poetry is poetry written by poets from Ireland, politically the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today. It is mainly written in Irish, though some is in English, Scottish Gaelic and others in Hiberno-Latin. The complex interplay between the two main traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English and Scottish Gaelic, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to categorise.
Pat Boran is an Irish poet.
Francis Arthur Ormsby is an author and poet from Northern Ireland.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish author and poet, feminist, and LGBT+ activist. Her work is known for centring feminist and queer themes, specifically lesbian love and lesbian eroticism.
Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. A member of Aosdána, he is poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. Born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, he currently resides in Dublin.
Louis de Paor is a well-known poet in the Irish language. Born in Cork in 1961 and educated at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh, de Paor edited the Irish-language journal Innti, founded in 1970 by Michael Davitt, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Liam Ó Muirthile and Gabriel Rosenstock. He was awarded a PhD in Modern Irish from the National University of Ireland in 1986 for his thesis on Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
Padraic Fiacc was an Irish poet, and member of Aosdána, the exclusive Irish arts academy.
Robert Greacen (1920–2008) was an Irish poet and member of Aosdána. Born in Derry, Ireland, on 24 October 1920, he was educated at Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. He died on 13 April 2008 in Dublin, Ireland.
John F. Deane is an Irish poet and novelist. He founded Poetry Ireland and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1979.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is an Irish poet and academic. She was the Ireland Professor of Poetry (2016–19).
Theo Dorgan is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer, translator, librettist and documentary screenwriter. He lives in Dublin.
Moya Cannon is an Irish writer and poet with seven published collections, the most recent being Collected Poems.
The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is an Irish poetry award for a collection of poems by an author who has not previously been published in collected form. It is confined to poets born on the island of Ireland, or who have Irish nationality, or are long-term residents of Ireland. It is based on an open competition whose closing date is in July each year. The award was founded by the Patrick Kavanagh Society in 1971 to commemorate the poet.
Michael Coady was an Irish poet, writer, historian, photographer, genealogist, and journalist.
Cathal Ó Searcaigh, is a modern Irish language poet. His work has been widely translated, anthologised and studied. "His confident internationalism", according to Theo Dorgan, has channeled "new modes, new possibilities, into the writing of Irish language poetry in our time".
Gerard Smyth is an Irish poet, born in Dublin in 1951 and began publishing poetry in the late 1960s when his first poems were published by David Marcus in the New Irish Writing Page of The Irish Press and by James Simmons in The Honest Ulsterman.
Kerry Hardie is an Irish poet and novelist.
Anne Haverty is an Irish novelist and poet. Haverty was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne and in 1992 won a scholarship to the European Film School at Ebeltoft in Denmark. Among Haverty's novels, One Day as a Tiger won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1997.
Liam Ó Muirthile was a prominent Irish-language poet who also wrote plays and novels, he was also a journalist. Ó Muirthile originally came to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork who collaborated in the journal Innti in the late 1960s.
