Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan was born in Dublin and educated at University College Cork, where he studied Archaeology and Medieval History. In 1975 he published his first collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor. Subsequent collections include The Selected Paul Durcan (1982), The Berlin Wall Café (1985), Going Home to Russia (1987), and Daddy, Daddy (1990), which won both Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry Award. His latest book is The Art of Life and another volume of poetry, The Laughter of Mothers, is forthcoming. One of modern Ireland's most distinctive poets, Paul Durcan is renowned as both an outspoken critic of his native country, and as a chronicler of its emergence from the repressions of the 1950s to the contradictions of the present day.