David Wheatley was born in Dublin in 1970. He has published four collections with The Gallery Press: Thirst (1997, Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006) and A Nest on the Waves (2010). He is the translator of the bilingual collection Foreign News (2017) by Aifric Mac Aodha. With Justin Quinn he was a founder-editor of Metre.

David Wheatley was awarded the Vincent Buckley Prize in 2008 and features in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry. He teaches at the University of Aberdeen, having previously taught in Hull University.

He has also edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan (Gallery, 2003) and Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930-1989 (Faber, 2009).

He features in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets and other anthologies. He reviews for a wide range of journals, including The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Wheatley’s is a poetry of displacement, uncertainty and sheer possibility; jumping from place to place, idea to idea, the real to the imagined . . . Stimulating, resourceful and often very funny . . .
— Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian

. . . [Wheatley’s] allusive richness of texture, his sense of history, his ability to take on with convincing panache other voices . . . his startling imagery . . . his formal relaxation and nicely calibrated freshness of language . . . Wheatley’s best poems — especially those in which one detects the telling fusion of subjective feelings and objective facts — have an original shine to them, and their “light is what / we see the dark by”.
— Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times