Matt Kirkham (England/Ireland) read for the Hewitt at the National Poetry Day Reading in Armagh (2013), alongside Paula Cunningham
Born in Luton, Matt moved to Ireland some time ago and is currently the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator at a school on the Ards Peninsula (Co. Down). He read Mathematics at Cambridge and that field of study continues to inform his poetry in terms of both subject matter and playfulness of form.
His poetry has been widely anthologised, including in “The New North” (Wake Forest, 2008), “Landing Places” (Dedalus, 2010) and “New Poets from the North of Ireland” (Blackstaff, 2016). His debut collection, “The Lost Museums” (Lagan Press) won the 2006 Rupert and Eithne Strong Prize for Best First Collection. Now with Templar Poetry, he won their inaugural iOTA Shots Award with “Aged Fourteen My Grandfather Runs Away to Sea” (2011) and has gone on to Publish “The Dumbo Octopus” (2016) and “Thirty-Seven Theorems of Incompleteness” (2019), which follows the marriage of logician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele through the tumult of the twentieth century. Along with “The Lost Museums”, these collections served to confirm Matt as one of the most gifted and interesting poets writing in Ireland today.