Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland in 1963 and currently lives in Dublin where he is Programme Director of the annual Dublin Writers Festival (www.dublinwritersfestival.com) and publisher of the Dedalus Press (www.dedaluspress.com) which publishes contemporary poetry from Ireland and poetry in English-language translation from around the world. In addition he presents the weekly half-hour poetry programme The Enchanted Way on RTE (www.rte.ie/radio), Ireland’s national radio service. To date he has published four full-length collections of poetry, the first of which, The Unwound Clock,  won the 1989 Patrick Kavanagh Award, followed by Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996) and, in 2001, As the Hand, the Glove. His New and Selected Poems appeared in spring 2005 from Salt Publishing in the UK. His first short fiction for children, All the Way from China, appeared in 1998 from Poolbeg Press and was shortlisted for the Bisto Book of the Year Award, while his non-fiction work includes the popular writer’s handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (originally published in 1998 and republished in an updated edition in 2005 by New Island) as well as A Short History of Dublin (Marino/Mercier Press, 2000). He regularly reviews new publications for a number of literary journals and newspapers.

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All poems taken from Pat Boran’s New and Selected Poems, published 2005 by Salt Publishing (Cambridge, UK), www.saltpublishing.com. Pat Boran’s own website is at www.patboran.com