In the Poetry Programme at 7:30 pm on Sunday 5th April on RTÉ Radio 1, Olivia O'Leary meets poets Dairena Ní Chinnéide and Gerard Smyth.
Dairena Ní Chinnéide lives on the Dingle Peninsula, writes in Irish and English, and translates her own work. A former broadcast journalist, she was managing director of the television production company Smerbhic Teo and worked as an interpreter at the European Parliament.
Her recent awards include the Books Ireland/Irish Writer's Centre/ IMRAM Flashfiction competition, the Ealaín na Gaeltachta Bursary, and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. She joins Olivia to read from deleted, published by Salmon Poetry, her first English language collection, which was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award. She also reads a poem in Irish and English from her bilingual collection Fé Gheasa/Spellbound (Arlen House).
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Gerard Smyth was born in the Liberties area of Dublin which has influenced, and features in, much of the poetry he has written. It is the factor in his work that prompted the poet Michael Hartnett to say "Gerard Smyth is essentially a city-poet; lyrical, passionate, he may do for Dublin in verse what Joyce did for it in prose".
He has worked all his professional life as a journalist with the Irish Times with responsibility for arts coverage. He was the newspaper's poetry critic for several years in the late 1970s and is currently the newspaper's poetry editor. He joins Olivia to talk about his latest collection, The Sundays of Eternity, published by Dedalus Press.
The Poetry Programme, RTÉ Radio 1, Sundays at 7:30 pm from Sunday 22nd March - listen back after broadcast here.
