Pat Boran


Pat Boran is an Irish poet.

Biography

Born in Portlaoise, Boran has lived in Dublin for a number of years. He is the publisher of the Dedalus Press which specialises in contemporary poetry from Ireland, and international poetry in English-language translation, and was until 2007 Programme Director of the annual Dublin Writers Festival. Currently he is the presenter of "The Poetry Programme", a weekly half-hour poetry programme on RTÉ Radio 1, where he has interviewed poets such as Tess Gallagher, Tony Curtis, John Haynes, Gerry Murphy and Jane Hirshfield. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1989 and in 2008 received the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN.
His poetry publications include The Unwound Clock, History and Promise, Familiar Things, The Shape of Water, As the Hand, the Glove and The Next Life. His New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by the Dennis O'Driscoll, was first published by Salt Publishing UK and was reissued in 2007 by Dedalus Press. Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku, a book-length haiku sequence or rensaku that explores the interplay of flora, fauna and human activity on Dublin Bay's Bull Island was published in 2015 by Orange Crate Books. The book also features the author's own photographs. A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems was published in 2017, also by Orange Crate Books. In 2019, he published the poetry collection Then Again. Volumes of his selected poems have appeared in Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese and Macedonian. His writers' handbook, The Portable Creative Writing Workshop, is now in its fourth edition while his A Short History of Dublin is published by Mercier Press. In 2007, Boran was elected to the membership of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists and writers. In 2019, Boran co-edited a volume of poetry with Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Writing Home: The New Irish Poets.

Works

Poetry books