Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian (born as Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is a poet from Northern Ireland.

Life
She was born the third of six children as Maeve McCaughan to Hugh and Margaret McCaughan in North Belfast. Her father was a school headmaster and her mother an influential art and music enthusiast. She was educated at Holy Family Primary School and Dominican Convent, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree in 1974 at Queens University, Belfast. Maeve McCaughan adopted the Irish spelling of ner name, Medhbh, when her university teacher, Seamus Heaney, wrote her name that way when signing books to her. She married a teacher and poet, John McGuckian, in 1977.

She has worked as a teacher in her native Belfast at St. Patrick's College, Knock and an editor and is a former Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast (1985–1988). She spent part of a term appointed as visiting poet and instructor in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley (1991).

Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, All The Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.

Medbh McGuckian has also edited an anthology, The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, written a study of the car in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, entitled Horsepower Pass By! (1999), and has translated into English (with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) The Water Horse (1999), a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. A volume of Selected Poems: 1978-1994 was published in 1997, and among her latest collections are The Book of the Angel (2004) The Currach Requires No Harbours (2007), and My Love Has Fared Inland (2008).

Recent criticism of McGuckian has pointed to her extensive use of unacknowledged source material, from Russian poetry and elsewhere, a discovery that may have motivated her decision to name (on the acknowledgements page) the primary source for her collection, The Currach Requires No Harbour.

Recognition
She was awarded the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for her poem She is in the Past, She Has This Grace. She has been shortlisted twice for the Poetry Now Award for her collection, The Book of the Angel, in 2005, and for The Currach Requires No Harbour, in 2007.

Other honors include an Ireland Arts Council Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the Cheltenham Prize. She was also the first woman to hold the Writer-in-Residence position at Queen's University in Belfast. "[

Publications

 * Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems (chapbook), Interim Press, 1980.
 * Portrait of Joanna (chapbook), Ulsterman, 1980.
 * (With Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall) Trio Poetry, Blackstaff Press, 1981.
 * The Flower Master, Oxford University Press, 1982; reprinted as The Flower Master and Other Poems, Meath: Gallery Press, 1993.
 * The Greenhouse, Steane, c. 1983.
 * Venus and the Rain, Oxford University Press, 1984.
 * On Ballycastle Beach, Oxford University Press, 1988; reprinted, Gallery Books, 1995.
 * (With Nuala Archer) Two Women, Two Shores, New Poets, 1989.
 * Marconi's Cottage, Gallery Press, 1991.
 * Captain Lavender. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1995.
 * Selected Poems, 1978-1994, Gallery Press (County Meath), 1997.
 * Shelmalier, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1998.
 * Drawing Ballerinas, Gallery Press, 2001.
 * The Face of the Earth, Gallery Press, 2002.
 * The Book of the Angel, Gallery Press, 2004.
 * The Currach Requires no Harbours. Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 2007.
 * My Love Has Fared Inland. Wake Forest University Press, 2010.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.