Gerald Dawe

Gerald Dawe (born 1952) is an Irish poet.

Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up with his mother, sister, and grandmother.

He attended Orangefield Boys Secondary School across the city in East Belfast, a leading progressive liberal state school.

He was later involved in the Lyric Youth Theatre under inspirational teacher and theatre director, Sam McCready.

Around this time he started to write poems and after a brief period living in London, he returned to the North, receiving a B.A. (Hons) from the fledgling New University of Ulster (1974) where his professor was the left-wing literary critic and novelist, Walter Allen, and where he was associated with the so-called Coleraine Cluster of poets and writers.

Dawe worked briefly as an assistant librarian at the Fine Arts department, in the Central Library in Belfast before being awarded a Major State Award for Postgraduate Research from the Dept. of Education, Northern Ireland.

His first full collection, Sheltering Places, was published in 1978, receiving two years later, a Bursary for Poetry from the Arts Council of Ireland.

In Galway, he met Dorothea Melvin, his future wife, and settled in east Galway with his family – Iarla and Olwen.

His second collection, The Lundys Letter, was published in 1985 and was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature.

The collection was concerned with the cultural and social roots of his background in Belfast and of the different Irish and emigre histories of his own family, highlighted by his new life in the west of Ireland.

with Edna Longley (1985)

In 1988 he was appointed Lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin and for the next five years commuted between his home in Galway and work in Dublin before the family moved to Dublin in 1992.

Around 1990, he co-founded Lagan Press with Fortnight magazine manager Patrick Ramsey (absorbed by the Verbal Arts Centre in 2013); Dawe's How's the Poetry Going?: Literary Politics & Ireland Today (1991) was the new publisher's first book.

He has lived for many years in County Dublin with his wife, Dorothea, who was chairperson of the 'think-tank', Encounter, director of the cultural resource body, Cultures of Ireland and head of public affairs at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey, during the late 1990s and is currently a board member of the Irish Association.

As editor

As Co-editor

His subsequent poetry volumes, Sunday School (1991) and Heart of Hearts (1995), developed and deepened this exploration of the cultural diversity of Northern Ireland's cultural inheritance as seen through the lifestyle and customs of one family.

with John Wilson Foster (1991)

with Aodan Mac Poilin (1994; new edition 2011)

with Jonathan Williams (1996)

His subsequent collections – The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003) and Points West (2008) – mark an important departure from the Irish settings and primary concerns of his earlier work and established Dawe as a significant European poet in both range and reference, confirmed by the publication of Selected Poems (2012), and most recently, 'Mickey Finn's Air' (2014).

He has given numerous readings and lectures in many parts of the world and during the political upheavals in former East Europe was a regular contributor to festivals and conferences organized by The British Council, among others.

with Michael Mulreany (2001)

Dawe was appointed a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2004 and was a Professor in English and the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing (1997-2015).

A volume of his selected poems appeared in German in 2007 and he has also been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, while he co-translated into English the early poems of the Sicilian poet and Nobel laureate, Salvatore Quasimodo.

Dawe has published extensively on Irish poetry and cultural issues, much of which is collected in his prose works: The Proper Word: Collected Criticism (2007), Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015), In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast (2017) and The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018).

with Maria Johnston (2008)

with Maria Johnston and Clare Wallace (2008)

with Marco Sonzogni (2008)

with Kay Donnelly (2011)

with Aodan Mac Poilin (2012)

with Darryl Jones and Nora Pelazzi (2012)

He retired from Trinity College Dublin in 2017.

He has also held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the US as well as receiving International Writers' Fellowships from Hawthorden (UK) and Ledig Roholt Foundation in Switzerland.

Dawe decided to attend University College Galway (UCG) and wrote his graduate thesis on the little-known 19th-century Tyrone novelist and short story writer, William Carleton.

He also started to lecture in the Dept. of English at UCG (now known as the University of Galway).

Ethna McCarthy Poems with Eoin O'Brien (2019)