Desmond O'Grady
Born in Limerick in 1935, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has lived abroad in Paris, Rome, Cairo and Alexandria. His collected poems, The Road Taken, was compiled from more than a dozen books from 1956 to 1996. He has published numerous translations, which are compiled as Trawling Tradition: 1954-1994, and include works from Welsh, Greek and Arabic; he also translated the selected poems of C. P. Cavafy (1999). He has published extracts from his personal literary memoirs. In 2001, on the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Kinsale, he completed a long poem commemorating the event, which was set to music by Pat Crowley and published in 2002. He is currently working on the second part of his collection of poems, The Wandering Celt. He lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork.
His publications number twenty three collections of his own poems, including the Road Taken: Poems 1956-1996 and The Wandering Celt, and twelve collections of translated poetry, among them Trawling Traditions: Translations 1954-1994, Selected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, The Song of Songs and, in 2005, Kurdish Poems of Love and Liberty, in addition to prose memoirs of his literary acquaintances and friends. The publication of On My Way in 2006 marked the 50th anniversary of his first published collection, Chords and Orchestrations.
Desmond was the 2004 recipient of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship.
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