Micheal O'Siadhail was born in 1947. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. A full-time writer, he has published ten collections of poetry. He was awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1982 and the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. His poem suites, The Naked Flame, Summerfest, Crosslight, and Dublin Spring, were commissioned and set to music for performance and broadcasting.

His latest collections are Globe (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), Love Life (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), The Gossamer Wall (Time Being Books, 2002) and Our Double Time (Bloodaxe Books, 1998). Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1992) includes selections from six of his collections, The Leap Year (1978), Rungs of Time (1980), Belonging (1982), Springnight (1983), The Image Wheel (1985), as well as the whole of The Chosen Garden (1990) and a collection, The Middle Voice (1992). A selection of his earlier poetry, Poems 1975–1995, drawing on both Hail! Madam Jazz and A Fragile City (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), was published by Bloodaxe in 1999. The Gossamer Wall received a special recommendation from the judges of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize in 2003. A book of critical essays on his work, Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail, edited by Marc Caball and David F. Ford, was published in 2007, by Carysfort Press.


For more information, see www.osiadhail.com.