Leontia Flynn has published four poetry collections. Her first book, These Days, won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her most recent, The Radio (2017), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her other awards include an Eric Gregory Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, and the AWB Vincent Literary Award, and she has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is Reader in Poetry at Queen's University Belfast and was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Funny, touching, satirical, breathtaking and dazzling by turns, packed full of exceptional poems. -- Damian Smythe * Belfast Morning Telegraph * The Radio sparkles with 21st-century chutzpah, sometimes offset by maternal angst. -- Carol Rumens * Guardian * Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - should read her. Her understanding of what it is to be a woman is one of the things (by no means the only thing) that makes this collection so powerful. Her thinking is complicated but never arrogantly inaccessible. I was bowled over by this, her fourth collection. I kept returning to poems for the sheer pleasure of them - no slog involved. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * Leontia Flynn's The Radio sees one of Northern Ireland's most assured voices continue her engagement with the alchemy of form in an effortlessly contemporary manner, indeed driving the thought thrillingly through longer stanza forms, including a brilliant elegy for Heaney. Theexposure of family, and its intimate matrix of the generations, to the equal threats of history and human frailty is played out in work with an intense sense of place and moment. -- W.N. Herbert, chair of the judges of the 2017 Eliot Prize Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Radio is an outstanding book from a poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation. -- John McAuliffe * Irish Times *