Conor O’Callaghan
Conor O’Callaghan was born in Newry, County Down, in 1968, and grew up in Dundalk. The History of Rain, published by The Gallery Press in 1993, was shortlisted for the Forward ‘Best First Collection’ Prize and won the Patrick Kavanagh Award.
Seatown was published in 1999, Fiction, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, appeared in April 2005. The Sun King, his fourth collection, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published in 2013. He has been writer-in-residence at University College Dublin and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, and co-holder of the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies, Villanova University. From 2005-2010 he was poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He has also been director of the annual Poetry Now Festival in Dun Laoghaire (2000-2003).
Apart from poetry, Conor has written widely on sport. His radio documentary on cricket in Ireland, ‘The Season’, was produced by Dick Warner in 1996 and has been repeated several times. A further essay, ‘Jolly Good Shot Old Boy’, appeared in the anthology Playing the Field: Eleven Irish Writers on Sport (New Island, 2000). ‘One-One’, his comic prose memoir of the public furore surrounding Ireland’s involvement in the 2002 football World Cup that appeared in The Dublin Review, eventually became the book Red Mist — Roy Keane and the Football Civil War (Bloomsbury 2004), which in turn was adapted by Eamon Little to a one-hour film — part documentary, part animation — for Setanta TV in 2007.
Conor O’Callaghan lives in Manchester and currently works both as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and as a tutor on distance learning MA at Lancaster University.
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