Maureen Boyle (Ireland) is a former committee member of the John Hewitt Society and read at the Spring School in Carnlough as well as at the International Summer School in Armagh, alongside Siobhan Campbell and Nessa O’Mahony in 2017 and with Emma Must in 2023. Maureen has conducted Creative Writing workshops and writer interviews for the Summer School across several decades.

Maureen was born in Strabane and studied at Trinity College Dublin before postgraduate work in the Universities of East Anglia and Ulster. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and taught English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. Already widely published in journals and anthologies, runner up in the 2004 Patrick Kavanagh Awards, and the winner of the 2007 Strokestown Festival and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize, Maureen’s long-awaited debut collection, The Work of a Winter, was published by Arlen House in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for Best First Collection. In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. In 2017 she was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Ann More, wife of John Donne, and her pamphlet, Strabane, with photographs by her husband Malachi O’Doherty, was published by Arlen House in 2020. Her second full collection, The Last Spring of the World was published by Arlen House in 2022.