Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Ní Chuilleanáin is “among the very best poets of her generation.”
– The Irish American Cultural Institute
Born in Cork in 1942, Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin graduated from University College Cork in 1962, with a BA in English and History, followed by a MA in English in 1964. She later studied at Oxford University. Ní Chuilleanáin is Professor Emeritus of English and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, having previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters) before her retirement in 2011. From 2016–2019 she also served as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, and in 2022 she was elected Saoi by the Irish artists’ association Aosdána, their highest honor. Ní Chuilleanáin is a co-founder of the literary journal Cyphers, which she started in 1975 with Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, and her late husband MacDara Woods. She lives in Dublin and has a son, Niall.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is often cited not only as a major poet in the generation after Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Richard Murphy, but also as the foremost female poet now writing in Ireland and Great Britain. Long recognized internationally for her work, she has been awarded the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award by The Irish American Cultural Institute, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Piggott Prize, and the 1573 International Poetry Prize, one of China’s highest literary honors. Her previous volumes include Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; Site of Ambush (1975); The Second Voyage (1977), which included selections from the previous two volumes; The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems (1991); The Brazen Serpent (1995); The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2002); Selected Poems (2009); The Sun-fish (2010), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Boys of Bluehill (2015), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection; and The Mother House (2020). Ní Chuilleanáin has also published translations, including the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in The Water Horse (2001), which she co-translated with Medbh McGuckian, and The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012), translated from the Romanian poetry of Ileana Mălăncioiu. Wake Forest University Press published her Collected Poems in 2021 and will publish a new volume, The Map of the World, in 2025.
*Author photo by Niall Hartnett
Praise for Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
“[Ní Chuilleanáin’s work] thrives on the creepings, rustlings and imperceptible burgeonings of life which are the opposite of sureness and solidity.”
– Clair Wills, TLS
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin employs a poetic point of view that is displaced, unspecified, and often enigmatic; her poetry resonates with ancient rites and presences from a spiritual otherworld. She is a unique poet who has influenced younger writers, broadened the scope of Irish poetry, and earned her place among the very best poets of her generation.”
– Citation for the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute
“Ní Chuilleanáin is the Vermeer of contemporary poetry. Her luminous interiors achieve great visual beauty, but should not be mistaken for exercises in escapism. They are sites where history and the individual brush against each other, force fields of action and radiant understanding.”
– Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
Comments are closed.