The Thankless Paths to Freedom

Medbh McGuckian lives with her family in Belfast, where she was born, raised, and educated. She graduated from Queen's University Belfast and was the first woman to be named writer-in-residence there. She is the author of nearly twenty individual volumes of poetry, as well as two Selected Poems (1997, 2015). Her many awards include the Eric Gregory Award, the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Forward Prize for Best Poem. Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, where she now lives with her husband and four children. She received both a BA and MA from Queen's University, where, alongside Paul Muldoon, she studied under Seamus Heaney. In 1985, she returned to Queen's as the university's first female writer-in-residence. She has also held residencies at the University of Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as universities in America. Medbh McGuckian published her first two chapbooks in 1980 before her first full-length collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council.