Writer in Residence announced at UCC
Matthew Sweeney has been appointed Writer in Residence at UCC
Matthew Sweeney has been appointed Writer in Residence at UCC
Matthew Sweeney’s recent volumes include The Night Post: A New Selection (Salt, 2010), Black Moon (Cape, 2007), Sanctuary (Cape, 2004) and Selected Poems (Cape, 2002). He has also written poetry and fiction for children, including Up On The Roof: New & Selected Poems (Faber, 2001), and is the editor of The New Faber Book of Children’s Verse (2001).
He is also the co-author (with John Hartley Williams) of the highly-successful guide Writing Poetry (1997). His poetry has been translated into several languages.
Born in 1952 in Lifford, Co. Donegal, Matthew Sweeney moved to London in 1973. He studied at the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Freiburg and recently returned to live in Cork, after many years spent abroad. He has held previous residencies at, among other places, the University of East Anglia, and the South Bank, London. He is a member of Aosdána.
Matthew Sweeney’s poetry is characterised by what he has termed ‘alternative realism’: narratives in which the everyday world is transformed by the unsettling logics of dreams and parables. These ‘imagistic narratives’, as he has also described them, have an intensely visual quality, often structured around filmic dissolves that challenge, humorously and/or disquietingly, the accepted barriers between the mundane and the fabulous.
His writing has garnered many prizes, among which are the Prudence Farmer Prize (1984) and the Cholmondeley Award (1987). Black Moon was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
The School of English in UCC is delighted to host Matthew Sweeney. The School's teaching and research activities encompass language and literature in English from the earliest texts to contemporary critical theory and digital humanities. Particular strengths include: Irish literature; medieval and renaissance studies; drama, theatre practice and performance; romantic literature; American literature, modernism; literary theory; book history; film studies; and creative writing.
Did you know? Thursday October 4 is All-Ireland Poetry Day. A full list of events from around the country is available via: http://www.poetryireland.ie/whats-on/