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Michael Coady was born in 1939 in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, where he has worked as a teacher, musician and writer. Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1979 and also of Listowel Writers' Week and RTE Francis McManus short story awards, he has published four collections with The Gallery Press: Two for a Woman, Three for a Man (1980), Oven Lane (1987), All Souls (1997) and One Another (2003). Relay Books published Full Tide, a miscellany, in 1999.
Bursaries from An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council enabled him to travel in Newfoundland and the U.S.A. in the 1980s.
The epic story of Irish emigration to America has been a significant element in his work in relation to lost family ties and their 'emotional archaeology.' In his critically-acclaimed All Souls, and again in One Another, he successfully integrated poetry, prose and his own photographs in works of overall thematic unity. His writing emerges from an intimately known anchorage of place, with abiding themes of time and chance and memory, set against the human interplay of unsung lives and destinies. Humour and compassion are notable components of his work.
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Michael Coady has directed workshops, broadcast on radio and television
and given readings at arts events in Ireland and abroad. In 1998 he
was elected a member of Aosdána, and in 2004 he received the
eighth annual Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry of the University
of St Thomas Centre for Irish Studies, St Paul, Minnesota. Michael Coady was Heimbold
Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2005. He is married,
with three children, and continues to live in the town where he was
born.
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