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Martina Evans
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Martina Evans is an Irish poet, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children.
She is the author of twelve books of prose and poetry. Her first novel, Midnight Feast, won a Betty Trask Award in 1995 and her third novel, No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors (Bloomsbury, 2000), won an Arts Council England Award in 1999. Martina's fourth poetry collection, Facing the Public was published by Anvil Press in September 2009 and has won bursary awards from both the Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Eiraíon) and Arts Council England. Facing the Public was a TLS Book of the Year in 2009 and won the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Petrol, a prose poem won a Grants for the Arts Award in 2010 and was published by Anvil Press in 2012. A revised edition of Midnight Feast and Through The Glass Mountain, a new prose poem, were published by Bloom Books in June 2013. Burnfort, Las Vegas (Anvil Press 2014) was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2015. Mountainy Men, a new narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015 and Watch, a pamphlet, published by Rack Press in January 2016 was a Poetry Society Book Choice. The Windows of Graceland: New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Her latest collection American Mules (Carcanet 2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022 and was a TLS and Sunday Independent Book of the Year.
Martina has been Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London from 2003-2007 and again in 2011-2012. She has run workshops in Ireland, UK, Switzerland and the U.S. and seminars at London Metropolitan University, The National Film & Television School and Goldsmiths. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and University of East London and a Creative Writing tutor at the City Literary Institute, Covent Garden, London for many years. Currently she a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and Books Critic for the Irish Times.
She is the author of twelve books of prose and poetry. Her first novel, Midnight Feast, won a Betty Trask Award in 1995 and her third novel, No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors (Bloomsbury, 2000), won an Arts Council England Award in 1999. Martina's fourth poetry collection, Facing the Public was published by Anvil Press in September 2009 and has won bursary awards from both the Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Eiraíon) and Arts Council England. Facing the Public was a TLS Book of the Year in 2009 and won the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Petrol, a prose poem won a Grants for the Arts Award in 2010 and was published by Anvil Press in 2012. A revised edition of Midnight Feast and Through The Glass Mountain, a new prose poem, were published by Bloom Books in June 2013. Burnfort, Las Vegas (Anvil Press 2014) was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2015. Mountainy Men, a new narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015 and Watch, a pamphlet, published by Rack Press in January 2016 was a Poetry Society Book Choice. The Windows of Graceland: New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Her latest collection American Mules (Carcanet 2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022 and was a TLS and Sunday Independent Book of the Year.
Martina has been Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London from 2003-2007 and again in 2011-2012. She has run workshops in Ireland, UK, Switzerland and the U.S. and seminars at London Metropolitan University, The National Film & Television School and Goldsmiths. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and University of East London and a Creative Writing tutor at the City Literary Institute, Covent Garden, London for many years. Currently she a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and Books Critic for the Irish Times.
'Evans drops her depth charges intermittently, unexpectedly and with great power and control. Her technical excellence combines with a clear-eyed and capacious artistry so that no poem is only itself and every poem is changed by those around it... There are marvels in The Coming Thing that all talented storytellers will love: the sheer joy of spoken language, the honesty of the writing, the fragile exuberance of youth, which somehow survives its dooms long enough to recount them. Martina Evan's book will be valued by all who appreciate contemporary Irish poetry and will, this reader hopes, lead to the even wider audience that her brilliant and exceptional work has long deserved.'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Technical mastery of loose sonnet form and chatty iambic pentameters... transforming the materiality of life into poems that are both funny and profound.'
Clíona ní Ríordáin, Times Literary Supplement
'Evans will not give in to easy effects or even a singing line. It is all crosstalk, undertone, interruption, pure hilarity, like someone telling a story, like someone thinking. And somehow out of what feels like raw life comes a register that is often luminous [...] At page 100 we have been engaged by a rich sensibility, and a poet with an astonishing technical confidence who knows how to turn a poem or leave a reader unsure where the emotion is coming from. Feeling, in these poems, is subtly placed and managed. It is hard to see what more Evans can do with the fifty pages. The answer is a long poem called 'Mountainy Men', a bravura piece, filled with incident, tension, verbal excitement [...] Slowly, a poem that seems animated by random thoughts and images takes on a strange, concentrated power; the lines begin to feel like pure style, the narrative voice holding and wielding the hidden energies that Martina Evans consolidates, and then releases with such energy and confidence and verve.'
Colm Tóibín, Poetry Ireland Review
'Martina Evans' poems are compressed stories, if not entire novels, in all but their word counts. The specimens, none of them overlong, in American Mules jaunt along delightfully, as if spoken into your ear, and they show a particular interest in the details of the everyday - she is the least abstract, least generalising of poets. There is no poetical windbaggery here, more a pleasing companionableness, a grabbing-you-by-the-under-arm and racing you along beside'
Michael Glover, The Tablet
'Martina Evans's American Mules, a scintillating poetry collection from a unique, deeply observant, beautifully compassionate consciousness which creates a fully realised world of its own.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'American Mules by Martina Evans is a glorious collection of poems, two books within one, an astonishment of riches. How she melds narrative audacity with sharp insight and juicy lyricism is so memorable. It's a book that gets into your heart. These poems echo and shimmer'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Striking powers of social observation... every single adjective attentively exact... Without straining for effect, she mixes pity with horror - and a repeated theme of fallibility'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'Her work is humane and funny, often beautiful, always without sentiment or bitterness... It is loose, chatty and free, awash with hospitals, cats and shoes. For Evans the joy of the given moment, the past's ever-present grief, the dreams of films and books, are frequencies overlapping at once... Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable... American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.'
Conor O'Callaghan, The Irish Times
'Terrifying tales of peace'
Kate Clanchy, The Guardian
Susan Jane Sims, Artemis Poetry
'...a rich poetic contribution to our forthcoming interrogation of the War of independence, two intense and riveting dramatic monologues by women affected by the burning of Mallow in 1920, and the malaise of the new state in 1924.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times Best Books of 2018
'Full of insight and humour...Evans' ability to choose just the right word is unerring.'
Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Observer
'I loved everything about this book'
Kate Kellaway, The Observer
'Evans's ear for speech suits the monologue, and the monologues - talky, jumpy, Gothic - are intensely atmospheric, claustrophobic pieces... Here, and throughout, Evans catches the nightmarish powerlessness of living close to historical changes.'
John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
'Her ability to replicate on the page colloquial Irish rhythms and phrasing has been commented on before, and it draws the reader in from the beginning... Each poem is, in a sense, akin to a chapter of a novel, and there is narrative drive both within the poems and between them, but as they are poems, i.e. stand-alone entities and in this sense equally analogous to paintings, they serve as much as windows onto moments, thoughts, memories and feelings as narrative blocks.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'Evans' verse is tightly packed with images, but loose enough in its metre to read naturally. One can take the book at a running pace and enjoy a story with deep emotional beats, or slow the pace and reflect on the careful choice of wording.'
Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books
The admired vernacular brilliance of Martina Evans's poetry is applied here to her most ambitious work to date, bringing to vivid life one of the most terrible periods of Irish history from the Troubles around 1920 to the Civil War, as witnessed and experienced by two generations of women ... No other poet currently writing in Britain and Ireland can rival Evans's ability to represent the impact of the political on the personal without easy histrionics. This is a remarkable document, a major work.
Bernard O'Donoghue 'a subtle, challenging writer with a wonderfully destructive approach to the pieties she describes.'
John McAuliffe, Irish Times 'Evans' great skill is in knowing how much to put into a poem. She has a talent for selecting only the most resonant memories, for not over-icing the cake of sentiment. [...] Above all, Evans puts the right words in the right order, a dictum whose simple phrasing embodies its demands.'
Michael Duggan, PN Review 'These look like easy, anecdotal poems but they bite.'
Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times 'A deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.'
Irish Times 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale-telling.'
The Tablet
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Technical mastery of loose sonnet form and chatty iambic pentameters... transforming the materiality of life into poems that are both funny and profound.'
Clíona ní Ríordáin, Times Literary Supplement
'Evans will not give in to easy effects or even a singing line. It is all crosstalk, undertone, interruption, pure hilarity, like someone telling a story, like someone thinking. And somehow out of what feels like raw life comes a register that is often luminous [...] At page 100 we have been engaged by a rich sensibility, and a poet with an astonishing technical confidence who knows how to turn a poem or leave a reader unsure where the emotion is coming from. Feeling, in these poems, is subtly placed and managed. It is hard to see what more Evans can do with the fifty pages. The answer is a long poem called 'Mountainy Men', a bravura piece, filled with incident, tension, verbal excitement [...] Slowly, a poem that seems animated by random thoughts and images takes on a strange, concentrated power; the lines begin to feel like pure style, the narrative voice holding and wielding the hidden energies that Martina Evans consolidates, and then releases with such energy and confidence and verve.'
Colm Tóibín, Poetry Ireland Review
'Martina Evans' poems are compressed stories, if not entire novels, in all but their word counts. The specimens, none of them overlong, in American Mules jaunt along delightfully, as if spoken into your ear, and they show a particular interest in the details of the everyday - she is the least abstract, least generalising of poets. There is no poetical windbaggery here, more a pleasing companionableness, a grabbing-you-by-the-under-arm and racing you along beside'
Michael Glover, The Tablet
'Martina Evans's American Mules, a scintillating poetry collection from a unique, deeply observant, beautifully compassionate consciousness which creates a fully realised world of its own.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'American Mules by Martina Evans is a glorious collection of poems, two books within one, an astonishment of riches. How she melds narrative audacity with sharp insight and juicy lyricism is so memorable. It's a book that gets into your heart. These poems echo and shimmer'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Striking powers of social observation... every single adjective attentively exact... Without straining for effect, she mixes pity with horror - and a repeated theme of fallibility'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'Her work is humane and funny, often beautiful, always without sentiment or bitterness... It is loose, chatty and free, awash with hospitals, cats and shoes. For Evans the joy of the given moment, the past's ever-present grief, the dreams of films and books, are frequencies overlapping at once... Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable... American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.'
Conor O'Callaghan, The Irish Times
'Terrifying tales of peace'
Kate Clanchy, The Guardian
Susan Jane Sims, Artemis Poetry
'...a rich poetic contribution to our forthcoming interrogation of the War of independence, two intense and riveting dramatic monologues by women affected by the burning of Mallow in 1920, and the malaise of the new state in 1924.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times Best Books of 2018
'Full of insight and humour...Evans' ability to choose just the right word is unerring.'
Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Observer
'I loved everything about this book'
Kate Kellaway, The Observer
'Evans's ear for speech suits the monologue, and the monologues - talky, jumpy, Gothic - are intensely atmospheric, claustrophobic pieces... Here, and throughout, Evans catches the nightmarish powerlessness of living close to historical changes.'
John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
'Her ability to replicate on the page colloquial Irish rhythms and phrasing has been commented on before, and it draws the reader in from the beginning... Each poem is, in a sense, akin to a chapter of a novel, and there is narrative drive both within the poems and between them, but as they are poems, i.e. stand-alone entities and in this sense equally analogous to paintings, they serve as much as windows onto moments, thoughts, memories and feelings as narrative blocks.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'Evans' verse is tightly packed with images, but loose enough in its metre to read naturally. One can take the book at a running pace and enjoy a story with deep emotional beats, or slow the pace and reflect on the careful choice of wording.'
Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books
The admired vernacular brilliance of Martina Evans's poetry is applied here to her most ambitious work to date, bringing to vivid life one of the most terrible periods of Irish history from the Troubles around 1920 to the Civil War, as witnessed and experienced by two generations of women ... No other poet currently writing in Britain and Ireland can rival Evans's ability to represent the impact of the political on the personal without easy histrionics. This is a remarkable document, a major work.
Bernard O'Donoghue 'a subtle, challenging writer with a wonderfully destructive approach to the pieties she describes.'
John McAuliffe, Irish Times 'Evans' great skill is in knowing how much to put into a poem. She has a talent for selecting only the most resonant memories, for not over-icing the cake of sentiment. [...] Above all, Evans puts the right words in the right order, a dictum whose simple phrasing embodies its demands.'
Michael Duggan, PN Review 'These look like easy, anecdotal poems but they bite.'
Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times 'A deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.'
Irish Times 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale-telling.'
The Tablet
Awards won by Martina Evans
Short-listed, 2024 The PEN Heaney Prize (The Coming Thing)
Short-listed, 2024 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry (The Coming Thing)
Winner, 2022 The Pigott Poetry Prize
(American Mules) Short-listed, 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Pigott Poetry Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Roehampton Poetry Prize (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2015 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Burnfort, Las Vegas) Winner, 2011 Premio Ciampi Internazionale di Poesia (Ciampi International Poetry Prize) (Facing the Public)
(American Mules) Short-listed, 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Pigott Poetry Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Roehampton Poetry Prize (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2015 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Burnfort, Las Vegas) Winner, 2011 Premio Ciampi Internazionale di Poesia (Ciampi International Poetry Prize) (Facing the Public)
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