About
CIARAN O’DRISCOLL was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 1943, and presently lives in Limerick. He is a retired lecturer from the School of Art and Design at the Limerick Institute of Technology. In 2007, he was elected to Aosdána, an institution established by the Irish Arts Council to honour Irish artists and writers who have made an outstanding contribution to art and literature.
He has six collections of poetry to his credit: Gog and Magog (Salmon Publishing, Galway, 1987); The Poet and His Shadow (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1990); Listening to Different Drummers (Ibid,1993); The Old Women of Magione (Ibid, 1997); Moving On, Still There: New and Selected Poems (Ibid, 2001); and Life Monitor (Three Spires Press, Cork, 2009).
He has also published two poetry chapbooks, The Myth of the South with Dedalus in 1992 and Surreal Man with Pighog (UK) in 2006.
Vecchie Donne di Magione (a collection of his poems with Italian translations by Rita Castigli) was published by Volumnia Editrice, Perugia, in 2006. His Selected Poems in Slovene translation Nadzorovanje Ziivljenja (Life Monitor) was published by Kud France Preseren, Ljubljana, in 2013.
Liverpool University Press published his childhood memoir, A Runner Among Falling Leaves in 2001 while Pighog Press published his novel A Year’s Midnight in 2012.
He has won a number of awards for his work, including a Bursary in Literature from the Irish Arts Council (1983), the James Joyce Literary Millennium Prize (1989), and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry (2000).
He has read from his work and lectured on art and literature at various venues in Europe and America, and his poetry has been translated into French, German, Irish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Scots Gaelic, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian and Spanish. He has also translated French and Italian poetry into English.
He is a Committee Member of Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival. Reviewing his most recent poetry collection Life Monitor in The Irish Times, Eamonn Grennan wrote of Ciaran O’Driscoll as "a poet in confident possession and exercise of his craft. [His] poems do what good poems should do, widening and deepening the world for the rest of us."