Richard Murphy, one of Ireland’s leading poets, has died aged 90. Murphy, a member of Aosdána, passed away at his home in Sri Lanka, where he spent part of his childhood and returned to live in more recent years.
Born in 1927 in Co. Mayo, his father served in the British Colonial Service, and was the last British major of Columbo, the capital of Ceylon, later Sri Lanka. Upon the family's return to Ireland, Murphy was educated at boarding school and became a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral School, before winning a scholarship aged seventeen, to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under CS Lewis before abandoning Oxford in search of the poetic muse in the West of Ireland, where he spent much of the following decades.
Listen to The Lyric Feature: His Chosen Islands - Richard Murphy in the West
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His debut collection of poems, Sailing to an Island (1963), published by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, was a critical success, and is viewed today as a key text linking Irish and Anglo-Irish poetry traditions. This was followed by a series of acclaimed volumes, among them his signature work The Battle of Aughrim (1968), High Island (1974), The Price of Stone (1985) and The Mirror Wall (1989), as well as the definitive collection Poems: 1952-2012, published by Lilliput Press in 2013.
In 1954, Murphy established a long-term base at Cleggan, on the Connemara coast; a passionate sailor, he later renovated and ran the Ave Maria, a traditional Galway fishing boat, and purchased Ardoileán, a modest island in the vicinity of nearby Inishbofin. He moved from Connemara to Dublin in 1980, then to post-apartheid South Africa (to be near his daughter, Emily) in 1997, before settling in Sri Lanka.
His extended literary circle included Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who came to visit Murphy in Cleggan in 1962 - an encounter memorably recalled in his celebrated volume The Kick: A Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy, republished last year by Cork University Press. His final book, In Search of Poetry, was published by Clutag Press in 2017.
