Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast in 1952 and educated at the University of Ulster at Coleraine and University College Galway (now National University of Ireland, Galway) where he taught for many years. He is Associate Professor and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and director of the graduate writing programme. He has held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the United States.

His first collection of poems, Sheltering Places (Blackstaff) was published in 1978. His second collection, The Lundys Letter (1985) published by The Gallery Press, was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. Other awards include Arts Council Bursaries for Poetry, the Hawthornden International Writers' Fellowship and the Ledig-Rowholt International Writers' Award.

His subsequent poetry collections, Sunday School (1991), Heart of Hearts (1995), The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003) and Points West (2008) have also been published by The Gallery Press.

His collected criticism, The Proper Word, was published in 2007. My Mother-City, a memoir, also appeared in 2007. His other publications include The Night Fountain: Selected Early Poems of Salvatore Quasimodo (with Marco Sonzogni), the anthology, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish war poetry, 1914-1945, (both 2008), The World as Province: Selected Prose (2009) and Conversations: Poets & Poetry (2011).

References

David Gardiner, 'Uneasy Domesticity', Eire/Ireland: xxix:2 ,1994
Cathal Dallat, 'Mapping the Territory', The Guardian 18/10/2003
Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Irish Studies Review: 13 August 2005
Stan Smith, Irish Poetry and the construction of modern identity (Irish Academic Press, 2005)
Nicholas Allen, 'Introduction', Gerald Dawe, The Proper Word (Creighton University Press, 2007)
John Brown, In the Chair (Salmon Publishing, 2002)
Katrina Goldstone, 'Twilight Zones', Irish Studies Review 13:2 (May 2005)