Medbh McGuckian
Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland.
Biography
She was born the third of six children as Maeve McCaughan to Hugh and Margaret McCaughan in North Belfast. Her father was a school headmaster and her mother an influential art and music enthusiast. She was educated at Holy Family Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree in 1974 at Queen's University Belfast. Maeve McCaughan adopted the Irish spelling of her name, Medbh, when her university teacher, Seamus Heaney, wrote her name that way when signing books to her. She married a teacher and poet, John McGuckian, in 1977.She has worked as a teacher in her native Belfast at St. Patrick's College, Knock and an editor and was the first female Writer in Residence at Queen's University Belfast. She spent part of a term appointed as visiting poet and instructor in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Work
McGuckian's first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall (poet), and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master, which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an Arts Council (Ireland) award and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.Medbh McGuckian has edited an anthology, The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, written a study of the car in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, entitled Horsepower Pass By!, and has translated into English The Water Horse, a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. A volume of Selected Poems: 1978–1994 was published in 1997, and among her latest collections are The Book of the Angel ''The Currach Requires No Harbours, and My Love Has Fared Inland. The Currach Requires No Harbours includes a poem inspired by the lives of the Wrens of the Curragh.
She was awarded the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize for her poem "She is in the Past, She Has This Grace". She has been shortlisted twice for the Poetry Now Award for her collection, The Book of the Angel, in 2005, and for The Currach Requires No Harbour'', in 2007.