Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose poetry collection Gathering Evidence (Carcanet, 2014) won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week, the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize and the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Her debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, will be published in June 2018 by Hogarth and Oneworld. She is a fellow of the James Merrill Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Art Omi, and she has received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and the Ireland Funds Monaco Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, POETRY, Granta, Best British Poetry, Poetry Ireland, BBC Radio 3, and elsewhere. She divides her time between the Netherlands and Ireland.
'Carcanet Press and Belfast women poets are a very happy combination at the moment, and Caoilinn Hughes promises to be as individual a voice as Sinead Morissey. Add to that a caustic wit, as evidenced on Pacific Rim, or a gift for characterisation in Vagabond Monologue -- 'I'llll tell you what makes poetry flow? Nice big bank notes to be writing poems on'. And so say all of us.'
The Belfast Telegraph
'Hughes brings to the embers of the Irish lyric new breath, new music, new word hoards, reinvigorating that tradition. She spins news from her travels in the wide world and it feels like essential information. This collection is a flaring forth, an auspicious comet, signal of achievement and promise.'
Paula Meehan
'The notion of the poet as alchemist is a familiar one, but Caoilinn Hughes gives it new and enormous energy. I find myself wondering how she knows so much about so many things; and then I notice how far her poems travel beyond their own footprints. On page after page, she offers transformation -- turning facts into feeling, experience into knowledge, prose into poetry, science into art.'
Bill Manhire
Awards won by Caoilinn Hughes
Short-listed, 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards
(Gathering Evidence)
Short-listed, 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection (Gathering Evidence)
Winner, 2015 Shine/Strong Award (Gathering Evidence)
Caoilinn Hughes and Ronan Ryan (6 February 2014)