Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and prose writer born in 1981, who writes in both Irish and English. She is the author of several poetry collections including Résheoid (2011), Dúlasair (2012), and Clasp (2015), and is known for her performances, translations, and collaborations. A Ghost in the Throat (2020, Tramp Press) is her debut prose work, a formally hybrid book that weaves together the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill — an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who composed the great grief-poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire for her murdered husband — with Ní Ghríofa's own contemporary life as a mother of young children. The book investigates female creative legacy, translation, and the persistence of female voices across centuries. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2020 and numerous other prizes. Ní Ghríofa lives in Galway. Her work is celebrated for its capacity to hold the lyric and the critical, the personal and the historical, in extraordinary productive tension.