Editor Profile: John F Deane

Born Achill Island 1943, John F Deane founded Poetry Ireland and Poetry Ireland Review in 1979. He has been awarded the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, and poetry prizes from Italy and Romania. He was elected Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry in 1996, shortlisted for both the TS Eliot prize and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award and awarded residencies in Bavaria, Monaco and Paris. He is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists “whose work had made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland”, and in 2007 the French Government honoured him by making him “Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres”. In 2008 John F Deane was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College, and in April 2012 became Distinguished Visiting Professor in Suffolk University, Boston.

John F Deane's poetry collections include The Instruments of Art (2005), A Little Book of Hours (2008), The Eye of the Hare (2011), Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New & Selected Poems (2012), and Semibreve (2015), all published by Carcanet Press. 

His collections of essays published by Columba Press include In Dogged Loyalty, essays on religious poetry (2006), The Works of Love (2010) and Give Dust a Tongue: A faith and poetry memoir (2015). His fiction titles include The Heather Fields and Other Stories (2007) and Where No Storms Come (2010), both published by Blackstaff Press.