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). His fifth collection, The Kabul Olympics, will be published in April 2020.

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

The Kabul Olympics

Publication date: 2 April 2020

This is vivid poetry which pits individual lives and ordinary days and hours and minutes against the historical events and catastrophes which would blow them away.

€11.95 pb
€18.50 hb