Moya Cannon was born and grew up in Co. Donegal, Ireland. Her first language was Irish, and the dramatic mountains and coasts of her native county inspired her early poetry. After studying history and politics at University College, Dublin, she helped to set up an Irish medium school in Dublin before undertaking a graduate degree in International Relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Her interest in poetry having overtaken her interest in history, she settled to a teaching career which would leave time for writing. For many years she taught in a Galway school for adolescent Traveller children. In 2004 she was elected to Aosdána, the state-sponsored affiliation of Irish creative artists, which allowed her to give up full-time teaching. She has been editor of Poetry Ireland Review and, as Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies, she taught creative writing in Villanova University in 2011. For many years she was Co-Director of the International Writers’ Summer Course at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Although Dublin is now her home, most of her adult life was spent in Galway City and many poems reflect the experiences of the west of Ireland – the Connemara mountains, the Gaelic culture of the Aran Islands, the time-resonant limestone karst landscape of the Burren in Co. Clare.

In 1990, her first book (Oar, Salmon Press, Galway) won the Brendan Behan Award for the best first collection of poetry published in Ireland in the previous year. It was subsequently republished by Poolbeg Press, Dublin and Gallery Press, Oldcastle. She has since published five further collections. In 2001 she received the O’Shaughnessy Award from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. Her Collected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in February, 2021.

Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has been a central focus and she often gives readings with musicians and singers, among them the harper, Kathleen Loughnane, the traditional singers Maıghréad and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaıll and the RTE Con Tempo String Quartet. She has had poems set to music by the Irish composers Jane O’Leary, Ellen Cranitch and Neil Martin.

In her poems, history, archaeology, pre-historic art and geology figure as entry points to explorations of our complex relationship with the natural world and with our past. Migration is a central theme, the migrations of people, of birds and of culture. A recurring preoccupation is the web of connections between us, the land and seas of our endangered planet, and o the vast variety of lifeforms which the earth sustains.  Her poetry has been translated into many languages and bilingual selections have been published in Spanish, German and Portuguese.


Author photo taken by Adela Fernandez.