Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942, educated there and at Oxford before spending her working life as an academic in Trinity College, Dublin. A founder member of Cyphers, the literary journal whose final issue will be launched at this year’s Strokestown International Poetry Festival 2026.
She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute which called her “among the very best poets of her generation”, the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 1573 International Poetry Award, one of China’s highest literary honours.
Her poetry collections published by The Gallery Press, include Acts and Monuments (1972, winner of the 1973 Patrick Kavanagh Award), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977, 1986), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Brazen Serpent (1994), The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), Selected Poems (2008), The Sun-fish (2009, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009 and winner of the 2010 Griffin International Poetry Prize), Legend of the Walled-up Wife (translations from the Romanian of Ileana Malancioiu, 2011), The Boys of Bluehill (2015) and The Mother House (2019, winner of the 2020 Irish Times Poetry Now Award). Her Collected Poems was published in October 2020 and was winner of The Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ Week in 2021.The Map of the World, published in 2023, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and winner of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. Her New Selected Poems was published last year.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emerita) at Trinity College, Dublin. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-19. She was married to the poet Macdara Woods, who died in 2018. In May 2022 she was elected Saoi by the members of Aosdána, the highest honour of that affiliation of artists.
There is something second-sighted…about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic afflatus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greeting.
Seamus Heaney
