Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian (born as Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is a poet from Northern Ireland.

She was born the third of six children as Maeve McCaughan to Hugh and Margaret McCaughan in North Belfast. Her father was a school headmaster and her mother an influential art and music enthusiast. She was educated at Holy Family Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree in 1974 at Queens University, Belfast. Maeve McCaughan adopted the Irish spelling of her name, Medbh, when her university teacher, Seamus Heaney, wrote her name that way when signing books to her. She married a teacher and poet, John McGuckian, in 1977.

She has worked as a teacher in her native Belfast at St. Patrick's College, Knock and an editor and is a former Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast (1985–1988). She spent part of a term appointed as visiting poet and instructor in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley (1991).

Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, All The Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an Arts Council (Ireland) award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach (Wake Forest University Press).

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