Wake Forest University Press

Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, where she now lives with her husband and four children. A graduate of The Queen’s University Of Belfast with B.A. and M.A. degrees in English, she was the first woman to be named writer-in-residence in that university, where she now regularly teaches.

Her volumes include The Flower Master (1982), which won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt-Bartlett Award and Venus in the Rain (1984). Wake Forest has published On Ballycastle Beach (1988), Marconi’s Cottage (1992), Captain Lavender (1995), Selected Poems (1997), and Shelmalier (1998). In 2002, Wake Forest published The Soldiers of Year II, a collection of poems including many titles from Drawing Ballerinas and The Face of the Earth, which were published in Ireland in 2001 and 2002. The Book of the Angel was published in 2004 and The Currach Requires No Harbours in 2007. Her work has been anthologized in numerous collections, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967-2000.

Other prizes awarded McGuckian include the National Poetry Competition, The Cheltenham Award, The Rooney Prize for Literature, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Eric Gregory Award, and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. She has been published by Oxford University Press and Gallery Press in England and in Ireland.

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