Leontia Flynn
“Affectionate and truculent by turns, disenchanted but relishing the world around her, quick-witted and big-hearted, Leontia Flynn looks like the real thing.”
– Michael Longley
Irish poet Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. Her first book, These Days (2004), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and saw her named one of twenty “Next Generation” poets by the UK Poetry Book Society. Drives (2008) earned her the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her third collection, Profit and Loss, was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Radio (2018) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her fifth collection, Taking Liberties, was published in 2023 by Jonathan Cape, and a North American edition is forthcoming from Wake Forest University Press in February 2026.
Flynn was awarded the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2013, the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award for 2014, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2024. She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. She lives in Belfast and teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.
Praise for Leontia Flynn
“Such currents of difficult feeling, beneath the wise, glittering fronts of her poems, make them all the more remarkable.”
– Frances Leviston, The Guardian
“Flynn’s is one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by Muldoon 35 years ago … She doesn’t put a foot wrong on the page.”
– Fran Brearton
“Exact and casual and formally adept, a bit like an Irish (and female) Frank O’Hara, and not a bit like anyone else.”
– Adam Phillips, The Guardian
“The Radio proves that Flynn is a true original, unafraid to tackle the harder issues, delightful, unexpected, clever, with a deep and impressive knowledge of culture and literature.”
– Orla Fay, Reading Ireland
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