Elaine Feeney is an Irish poet, novelist, and playwright. Her writing focuses on "the central themes of history, national identity, and state institutions, and she examines how these forces structure the everyday lives of Irish women". A former slam poetry winner, she has been described as "an experienced writer who has been wrestling with poetry on page and on stage since 2006" and in 2015 was heralded as "one of the most provocative poets to come out of Ireland in the last decade". Her work has been widely translated, including into Italian, Lithuanian, and Slovene. Feeney's debut novel, As You Were, was won at auction in December 2019. It will be published by Penguin Random House, under the Harvill Secker imprint, on 20 August 2020. In January 2020 the Observer newspaper choose Feeney as one of the best debut novelists of the year.
Feeney teaches English at St. Jarlath's College, Tuam. She is also creative writing teacher at NUIG, where she is Creative Director for the Tuam Oral History Project. Her festival performances include Cúirt International Literature Festival, The Ex-Border Festival in Italy, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Vilenica Festival and The Electric Picnic. Her magazine publications include Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The Manchester Review, Stonecutter Journal and Coppernickel. Feeney's work has been collected by the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin. She is a regular leader of writing workshops - including for the Galway Feminist Collective and Cúirt International Literature Festival. Her work has been broadcast by RTÉ and other broadcasters. Feeney's political views have been sought by publications including the Irish Times. In response to a question about politics and her poetry she told headstuff.org: "I think all humans are political, at least the political world would have you believe, or inflict this on you, and each of us in our own peculiar way eventually marches to this tune, whether it’s complicit, as agitator, or an escapist or whatever way you have actively chosen to live your life."
Writing
Feeney is the author of three poetry collections, a play text, and a novel. The novelist, Mike McCormack, has written that her poems have having "a pounding physical presence yet they run away with the mind." A review of her most recent collection, Rise, in PN Review, states that its effect is "to explode the idea of canon with an intense exploration of personal life and its public manifestations". Speaking to The Poetry Review in 2017 Feeney described her approach to writing: "I rarely remember the actual physical act of writing a poem. Some take days, some years". In 2020, before the launch of her debut novel, she told The Observer she had “an anxiety around writing a novel that I didn’t feel around writing poetry, weirdly... Also I had my first son quite young – I was only 22 – and poetry was quicker." Elsewhere she has said that "sometimes my work comes in madly chaotic spurts, uncomfortable intrusions, poem ideas often come at me, quite brutally out of nowhere, and I’ll write them, and I may never be able to fully explain them, and sometimes they leaving me feeling really uncomfortable and awkward."
Poetry Collections
Indisipline, chapbook with Dave Lordan
Where's Katie?
The Radio was Gospel
Rise
Novel
As You Were
Playtext
WRoNGHEADED
Audio Publication
Cinderella Backwards CD of poetry with Sarah Clancy
