John Montague
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, he was raised in Co. Tyrone, and educated at University College Dublin, and Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley. He co-founded Claddagh Records, and became president of Poetry Ireland in 1979. He has taught at UCD, University College Cork, the Sorbonne, and at several American universities. His poetry includes Forms of Exile (1958); Poisoned Lands (1961); A Chosen Light (1967); Tides (1970); The Rough Field (1972), which was performed with music by the Chieftains at the Peacock Theatre; A Slow Dance (1975); The Great Cloak (1978); The Dead Kingdom (1984); Mount Eagle (1988); The Love Poems (1992); Time in Armagh (1993); Collected Poems (1995); Smashing the Piano (1999), and Carnac, a translation of work by the French poet Guillevic (1999). The Lost Notebook, a novella based on his youthful years in Florence, won the first Hughes Award in 1987. In 2000, he wrote a memoir, Company, and Penguin published his Selected Poems. Other fiction includes several collections of stories, Death of a Chieftain (1964), An Occasion of Sin (1992) and The Love Present (1997). He won the Marten Toonder Award in 1977, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980, and the Ireland Funds Literary Award in 1995. He was the first Ireland Professor of Poetry from 1998 to 2001. He lives in Co. Cork.
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