John McAuliffe

His book is every bit as good as I hoped it would be. McAuliffe’s got the gift. Mark the name. His sure hand is apparent in every line: syntax and pulse in the service of experience. This poet’s sense of shape and design provides structures that highlight his felicities of movement, texture and observation. No cheap ﬂourishes, no ingratiating mannerisms, just the real stuff, hard-won, handsomely brought off. This guy’s the total package, as we say over here about our young, star athletes.
— August Kleinzahler

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John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, County Kerry. He was educated at universities in Galway, Southern Illinois, and Dublin.

He has published four collections with The Gallery Press. His first, A Better Life (2002), was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. His second collection Next Door was published in 2007, Of All Places (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) in 2011 and The Way In (2015).

In 2000 he won the RTE Poet of the Future Award and, in 2002, the Sean Dunne National Poetry Award. He ran the Poetry Now Festival in Dun Laoghaire and established the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award for best collection.

He now lives in Manchester, where he co-directs the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and edits The Manchester Review. He also writes a regular poetry column in The Irish Times.

He has read and taught at many festivals and universities around Ireland, the UK, the US and elsewhere. He is a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School and was Visiting Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2010.

John McAuliffe Titles

Of All Places

PBS Recommendation.
An Irish Times Book of the Year, 2011

From the implicit surprise or exclamation of its title to the literal reach of all locations, John McAuliffe’s Of All Places embraces Roger Casement, Batman, the last Yahi Indian, the cultures of Stonehenge and Tara, and a former taoiseach in the company of someone ‘who might be his daughter’.

€11.95 pb
€18.50 hb