Sean O'Brien (writer)


Sean O'Brien FRSL is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is one of only four poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems.
Born in London, England, O'Brien grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived since 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, for 2016–17.

Career

O'Brien's book of essays on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse, was published in 1998, as was his anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001 was published in 2002. His new verse version of Dante's Inferno was published by Picador in October 2006. O'Brien's six collections of poetry to date have all won awards. In 2007, he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for The Drowned Book. This was the second time a poet had been awarded the Forward and the Eliot prizes in the same year.
In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and was previously Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. He is Vice-President of the Poetry Society. He was co-founder of the literary magazine The Printer's Devil, contributes reviews to newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement and is a regular broadcaster on radio. His writing for television includes "Cousin Coat", a poem-film in Wordworks ; "Cantona", a poem-film in On the Line ; Strong Language, a 45-minute poem-film and The Poet Who Left the Page, a profile of Simon Armitage. Other significant work includes a radio adaptation for BBC Radio 4 of "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
O'Brien was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

Awards and honours

Poetry

;Collections
  • 1983: The Indoor Park
  • 1987: The Frighteners
  • 1989: Boundary Beach
  • 1991: HMS Glasshouse
  • 1993: A Rarity
  • 1995: Ghost Train
  • 1995: Penguin Modern Poets 5
  • 1997: The Ideology
  • 2001: Downriver
  • 2002: Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001
  • 2002: Rivers
  • 2006: Inferno: a verse version of Dante's Inferno
  • 2007: The Drowned Book
  • 2009: Night Train
  • 2011: November
  • 2015: The Beautiful Librarians
  • 2018: Europa
  • 2019: Contributor to A New Divan, A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West, Gingko Library,
  • 2020: It Says Here
  • 2022: Embark
;Anthologies
  • 1998: The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945
  • 2008: Andrew Marvell: poems selected by Sean O'Brien
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Café de L’Imprimerie2014
In Translation2022Butcher's Dog poetry magazine, issue 16.-

Plays

  • 2000: Laughter When We're Dead
  • 2001: My Last Barmaid
  • 2001: Downriver, cowritten with Keith Morris
  • 2002: The Birds: a new verse version of Aristophanes' Birds
  • 2003: Keepers of the Flame
  • 2003: ''Live Theatre: Six Plays from the North East''

Novels

  • 2008: Afterlife
  • 2016: ''Once Again Assembled Here''

Short fiction

;Collections
  • 2005: Ellipsis 1: Short Stories by Sean O'Brien, Jean Sprackland and Tim Cooke
  • 2005: Phantoms at the Phil
  • 2006: Phantoms at the Phil- The Second Proceedings
  • 2007: Phantoms at the Phil- The Third Proceedings
  • 2008: The Silence Room
  • 2018: ''Quartier Perdu''

Literary criticism

  • 1998: ''The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry''