Mark Granier was born in London in 1957 and brought up in Dublin, where he still lives. He has published two collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry, AIRBORNE (2001) and THE SKY ROAD (2007). Mark Granier is also a photographer and has done cover work for a number of publications, including his own books....
Brian Turners book Here, Bullet won the Poets’ Prize in 2007. From Fresno, California, Brian Turner has seen his poems published in poetry daily, the atlantic review and several other publications. His poems have also appeared in the voices in wartime anthology. Turner is an MFA graduate of the University of Oregon and a...
Celebrated poet, author, artist, essayist, and activist Breyten Breytenbach was born in 1939 in the Western Cape and studied Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, before leaving the country in 1959. His literary debut Catastrophes (1964), a volume of stories, was followed by The Iron Cow Must Sweat . The latter was...
I started school in St. Canice’s at the age of seven. My future comrade Dermot Bolger sat in the next door classroom, though it would be 10 years before we were formally introduced. Our classrooms looked out at St. Canice’s Church. On my way home after school, I used to stop and sit in...
Anatoly Kudryavitsky was born in Moscow on Chekhov Street. That’s why his father, a great fan of Anton Chekhov, always called his son Anthony, but his mother kept calling him Anatoly; the subject his parents never agreed on. Anyway, he feels comfortable using either name or both. Anatoly was born in Russia; however his...
Poetry is a pink apron. Recently, I remembered wearing a pink apron when I was nine years old and went to the girl’s school the: Ecole Frederic Mistral in Menton on the Cote d’Azur in France. The apron, our uniform in class, was something I had never worn in Holland, the country where I...
Tom Mathews has been described by the Irish Times as “an Institution in Dublin for 30 years”. His own description is equally compelling: “Tom Mathews (Born 1952) is well over four feet tall. “Tom Mathews (Born 1952) is well over four feet tall. His Cupid’s bow legs and long flaming red nose have made...
My first memory is of standing in a hospital cot at night, looking over the cot bars to a rocking horse on the other side of the ward. There were coloured rings over the ward door. Utter silence, though there must have been the hum of traffic from the Holloway Road in London. The...
I grew up on the edge of a wetland meadow or Callows. The Callows was a wonderful place to get away to, a kind of outback where I felt I could hear myself think. I could reflect on my surroundings, try to understand the mystery and the magic. Poems only came later, in my...
I was born in Monaghan and grew up in a bewildering land of many-sided political opinion. On the one hand, the ‘North’ lay just seven miles away, but on the other I was rooted in the Irish Republic, the putative ‘South’ of many writers’ dreams. An ability to look both in two directions at...