Bernard O'Donoghue


Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.

Life

Born in Cullen, County Cork, Ireland, he moved to Manchester, England, when he was 16, where he attended St Bede's College. He has lived in Oxford, England, since 1965. O'Donoghue was :wikt:emeritus|emeritus fellow and tutor in Olde English and Medieval English, Linguistics and the History of the English Language, Modern Irish Literature, Yeats and Joyce at Wadham College, Oxford University from 1995 to 2011, where he had been referred to as "the nicest man in Oxford". He was previously reader and lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1971 to 1995, and was a colleague of John Fuller and David Norbrook. His former students include actress Rosamund Pike and journalist and satirist Ian Hislop.

Work

In 2006, Penguin Books published O'Donoghue's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. O'Donoghue has a wide range of specialities. He has written on courtly love, Thomas Hoccleve and Seamus Heaney.
His published poetry collections include Poaching Rights, The Absent Signifier, The Weakness, Gunpowder, and Here Nor There, Poaching Rights and Outliving.
O'Donoghue has said that the Anglo-Saxon elegies such as The Seafarer and The Wanderer are his "model for the perfectly formed lyric poem".
Along with the British poet and translator David Constantine, O'Donoghue is an editor of the distinguished Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press. He is the senior member of the Oxford University Poetry Society. His work has been published in the

Awards

O'Donoghue received the 1995 Whitbread prize for Poetry for his collection Gunpowder, and the Cholmondeley Award in 2009. He has also been shortlisted multiple times for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. He succeeded Seamus Heaney as Honorary President of the Irish Literary Society of London in 2014.

Poetry