Heather McHugh and Michael Longley
Friday 25th March at 8.30pm €20/15/12
Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh was born in San Diego in 1948. The recipient
of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of eight
volumes of poetry, numerous works of translation, and a book
of essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan
University Press, 1993).
Her poetry collections include A World of Difference (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993 (Wesleyan, 1994), a National Book Award finalist, The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan, 2001), Eyeshot (Wesleyan, 2003), which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
Along with her husband Nikolai Popov, McHugh won the
Griffin International Poetry Prize in Translation for Glottal Stop: 101 Poems of Paul Celan in 2001. She is a past Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and she has been Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle since 1984.
“...a compassionate eyewitness . . . Her lines are animated
but serious, and though they accelerate quickly, meaning
and humor can be found in a single word.”
The New Yorker
Michael Longley
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated
at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College,
Dublin, where he read Classics. His books include Gorse Fires
(Secker & Warburg, 1991) which won the Whitbread Prize for
Poetry, The Weather in Japan (Cape, 2000), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize, and his Collected Poems (Cape, 2006).
He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001, and a CBE in 2010, and recently held the post of Irish Professor of Poetry. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.
His new collection, A Hundred Doors, was published by Jonathan Cape earlier this month.
“One of the finest lyric poets of our century.”
John Burnside