Leontia Flynn (Ireland) delivered The Heaney O’Driscoll Lecture at the 2016 John Hewitt International Summer School and in that same year read for the Hewitt Society at the Ulster Museum, alongside novelist Sheila Llewellyn.
Leontia was born in County Down and is Reader with the School of Arts, English and Languages, attached to the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. She is one of Ireland’s leading poets and has published four poetry collections with Jonathan Cape: “These Days” (2004), “Drives” (2008) “Profit and Loss” (2011) and “The Radio” (2017). Most recently, she published a pamphlet, “Slim New Book”, with the Lifeboat Press (Belfast, 2020). She has also published a critical study of the poet Medbh McGuckian with Irish Academic Press (2014).
Leontia has won an Eric Gregory Award, The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Rooney Prize for Irish Writing, a Major Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council NI, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, the AWB Vincent Literary Award and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. She has also been nominated for the Costa Poetry Prize and the T S Eliot Prize, and, after her first collection, was selected as one of twenty ‘Next Generation poets’ by the Poetry Book Society.