Literature
Pat Boran
Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise in 1963 and has long since lived in Dublin since the early 1980s.
Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989 he has published seven full-length collections of poetry. Those books are: The Unwound Clock (1990), Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996), As the Hand, the Glove (2001), The Next Life (2012), Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2015) and Then Again (2019). His New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by the late Dennis O’Driscoll, was first published in 2005 and reissued by the Dedalus Press in 2007. Orange Crate Books published A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems (2017), updating and revising the earlier New and Selected in a pocket-sized format. Volumes of his poetry have also been published in Hungarian, Italian, Greek, Macedonian, French and Portuguese. Orange Crate Books also published 3 single-poem volumes, with photographs by the author: The Statues of Emo Court (2020), Building the Ark (2021) and On a Wave of Light (2022).
In addition to poetry, he has published numerous short stories in magazines and on radio. A collection, Strange Bedfellows was published in 1991 while a short fiction title for children, All the Way from China (1999), was a finalist for the Bisto Book of the Year Award. His non-fiction titles include the humorous memoir, The Invisible Prison: Scenes from an Irish Childhood (2009) (also published in Turkish and Italian), the writers’ handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (various editions) and A Short History of Dublin (2000).
A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review, he has edited multiple poetry anthologies and publications, among them: Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampler (2006), Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry (2009), The Bee-Loud Glade (2009), Shine On, Irish writers in support of those affected by mental ill-health (2011), with Gerard Smyth If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (2014), the One City, One Book designated title for that year; with Eugene O’Connell the poetry and prose anthology The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit A Touchstone Poem (2017) and, in 2020, The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems, illustrated by Gaetano Tranchino.
He has held a number of positions as Writer-in-Residence with public libraries/authorities and third-level institutes: with the Western Education and Library Centre in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, with Dublin City Council and at Dublin City University. He is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Writers Festival, a former presenter of both The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1, and continues to contribute to a number of programmes on the station, including the highly popular Sunday Miscellany. As an editor, he has edited more than ten anthologies of poetry and prose and more than 100 individual collections by Irish poets, emerging and established.
He has conducted writing workshops throughout Ireland and has represented Ireland at poetry and literature festivals abroad. He has received a number of Arts Council Bursaries and travel awards and was the 2008 recipient of the US-based Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award.
Since 2020 and the arrival of Covid, he has made more than 20 short poetry films, many of which have won prizes and featured in film and literature festivals in Ireland and abroad. A selection of these, as well as of his ongoing PoemCards project, may be found on the poet’s website at www.patboran.com.