Liam Ó Muirthile

Liam Ó Muirthile is a prominent Irish-language poet who has also written plays, novels and journalism.

He was born in Cork in 1950 and was educated there. He acquired Irish at school and from sojourns in the Gaeltacht of West Kerry. He was a member of an innovative group of poets at University College Cork in the late 1960s who chose Irish as a creative medium and were closely associated with the modernist poetry journal Innti, founded by fellow poet Michael Davitt (1950-2005). They were influenced by the work of Cork poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, by the musician and composer Seán Ó Riada, and by popular American culture.

It has been argued that a fundamental achievement of Ó Muirthile and other members of the Innti group was to adapt the language to a contemporary urban landscape in a way that reflected the counterculture of the sixties.

Ó Muirthile has been described as a poet of immense formal and musical mastery who has read deeply in the classical and neo-classical poetry of the Irish language. He studied French literature as a student and this has influenced his work. He has translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert and Anne Hébert.

His first collection of poetry was Tine Chnámh (1984). This received the Irish American Cultural Institute’s literary award and an Oireachtas prize for poetry. Since then he has published a number of other collections. In 1996 he received the Butler Award for his novel Ar Bhruach na Laoi. Several plays by him have been staged. From 1989 to 2003 he wrote a weekly column, “An Peann Coitianta,” for the Irish Times. Poems by him have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian.

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