Leontia Flynn Poetry Reading

Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. Her first book, These Days (2004), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and saw her named one of twenty ‘Next Generation’ poets by the UK Poetry Book Society. Drives, published in 2008, earned her the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her third collection, Profit and Loss, was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Radio, her newest collection, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

Flynn lives in Belfast and teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.

She will be reading from her most recent prize-winning collection, The Radio, published in 2017. Reviewing The Radio, Kate Kellaway said in The Observer,

‘Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers – especially new mothers – should read her. Her understanding of what it is to be a woman is one of the things (by no means the only thing) that makes this collection so powerful. Her thinking is complicated but never arrogantly inaccessible.’

This event is part of the Writers at York series, which offers a lively programme of public readings and workshops, and aims to celebrate and explore the work of emerging and established contemporary writers.