Leontia Flynn

Born in County Down, northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn earned an MA at Edinburgh and a PhD in English on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian at Queen’s University Belfast.
 
Influenced by Philip Larkin, Flynn often makes use of received formal structures as she studies the scaffold of a life with dark humor and a tender attention to the mind’s shifting light. In a 2008 review of Drives for The Guardian, Frances Leviston praises the “currents of difficult feeling, beneath the wise, glittering fronts of her poems.” In a 2011 interview with J.P. O’Malley for Culture Northern Ireland, Flynn states, “I think in poetry you go a funny way around the houses to get your meaning across. I do tend to make noises and sound effects sometimes, rather than use words. Poetry is always aware of this non-linguistic other part of itself.” Flynn is the author of several full-length collections of poetry, including The Radio (2017), Profit and Loss (2011), Drives (2008), and These Days (2004), which won the Forward Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. She has also been awarded the Eric Gregory Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
 
Flynn lives in Belfast and teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.