Episode 29 with Eilean Ni Chuilleanáin is now available anywhere you get podcasts
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942. She was a founder member of Cyphers, the literary journal (1975). Her first collection, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. The Gallery Press has published her nine collections of poems including The Sun-fish which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and The Mother House (2019) winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. Her 2023 collection The Map of the World won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-2019 and, in 2025, was elected a Saoi, the highest honour of Aosdána.
This week’s Southword poem is ‘Roadkill in Offaly’ by Simon Costello, which was one of the poems in the selection which won the inaugural Southword Editor’s Poetry Award and appears in issue 46. You can buy single issues, subscribe, or find out how to submit to Southword here.