Rita Ann Higgins

Rita Ann Higgins, Irish poet and playwright, born 1955.

Life
A native of Ballybrit, Galway, Higgins was one of thirteen children in a working-class household. She married in 1973 but following the birth of her second child in 1977, contracted tuberculosis, forcing her to spend an extended period in a sanatorium,

While confined, she began reading, and soon took to composing poems. She joined the Galway Writers' Workshop in 1982. Jessie Lendennie, editor of Salmon Publishing, encouraged Higgins, and oversaw the publication of her first five collections.

She was Galway County's Writer-in-Residence in 1987, Writer in Residence at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 1994-95, Writer in Residence for Offaly County Council in 1998-99. She was Green Honors Professor at Texas Christian University, in October 2000. Other awards include a Peadar O'Donnell Award in 1989, several Arts Council bursaries ‘Sunny Side Plucked’ was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was made an honorary fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University November 2006.

She is a member of Aosdána, though the group turned her down five times previously.

She cites the feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Irish Republican, Mary MacSwiney, as role models.

She lives in Galway and An Spidéal.

Writing
Poetry Foundation: "Higgins’s frank, wry poems often look squarely at economic and gender-based inequalities. Calling hers a 'smart, sassy, unabashed, female working class voice in Irish writing' in a 2011 Irish Times review of Ireland Is Changing Mother, Fintan O’Toole observes that 'the anger in her work is transmuted into invention and absurdity, and it rubs shoulders with other deliciously deadly sins, like lust and pride.'

Recognition
She is the recipient of the Peadar O’Donnell Award, several arts council grants, and residencies granted by National University of Ireland-Galway, Offaly County Council, and Galway City Library.

Poetry

 * Goddess on the Mervue Bus, 1986
 * Witch in the Bushes, 1988
 * Goddess and Witch, 1990
 * Philomena's Revenge, 1992
 * Higher Purchase, 1996
 * Sunny Side Plucked, 1996
 * An Awful Racket, 2001
 * Throw in the Vowels:New & Selected Poems, 2005
 * Ireland Is Changing Mother, 2011

Plays

 * Face Licker Come Home, 1991
 * God of the Hatch Man, 1992
 * Colie Lally Doesn't Live in a Bucket, 1993
 * Down All the Roundabouts, 1999
 * The Empty Frame, 2008
 * The Plastic Bag, 2008

Screenplay

 * The Big Break, 2004