Irish Writers Online / Author
Matthew Sweeney
Matthew Sweeney was born in Co Donegal in 1952. His poetry collections include A Dream of Maps (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1981); A Round House (London, Alison & Busby/ Raven, 1983); The Lame Waltzer (Allison & Busby,1985); Blue Shoes (Secker & Warburg,1989); Cacti (Secker & Warburg 1989); The Bridal Suite (London, Jonathan Cape, 1997); A Smell of Fish (Jonathan Cape, 2000); Selected Poems (Cape, 2002);Sanctuary (Jonathan Cape, 2004); and Black Moon (Jonathan Cape, 2007), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award and The Irish Times /Poetry Now Award.
A selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 12 (London, Penguin, 1997).
His childrens’ poetry collections are The Flying Spring Onion (Faber 1992); Fatso in the Red Suit (Faber 1995); and Up On The Roof: New & Selected Poems (Faber, 2001).
He has also written fiction for children: The Chinese Dressing Gown (Raven 1987); The Snow Vulture (Faber 1992); and Fox (London, Bloomsbury, 2002), which has been translated into German as Fuchs (Berlin, Berlin Verlag, 2003).
Full-length books of his work are available in Dutch, Czech, Spanish, Romanian; and German, including
Rosa Milch (Berlin Verlag, 2008), translated into German by Jan Wagner.
He is the co-author with John Hartley Williams of Writing Poetry (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997, updated 2003). He has co-edited, with Jo Shapcott, the anthology Emergency Kit, Poems for Strange Times (London, Faber & Faber, 1996); with Ken Smith, Beyond Bedlam, Poems Written Out of Mental Distress (London, Anvil Press, 1997); and Irish Poems (Macmillan Children’s Books, 2005)
His awards include the Prudence Farmer Prize (1984); Cholmondely Award (1987); and the Henfield Writing Fellowship (1986). In 1999, he received an Arts Council of England Writers Award, and in. 2001 an Arts Council of Ireland Writers’ Bursary. In 1994/95 he was Writer in Residence at the South Bank, London. He has been a recipient of the DAAD Fellowship in Berlin.
A member of
Aosdána, he has lived in Europe for some years.
