About Catherine Phil MacCarthy
Catherine Phil MacCarthy
(Photo credit: Stephanie Joy)
Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in Co. Limerick in 1954 and studied at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She taught at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) and at The Drama Centre, University College Dublin, before turning full-time to writing in 1999.
Joint winner of the Poetry Ireland/Co-Operation North Sense of Place competition in 1991 with Susan Connolly, a selection of her work was published under the title How High the Moon. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1990, was a prizewinner in the 1992 Patrick Kavanagh Awards, and shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in 1996. The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealíon awarded her bursaries for poetry in 1994, 1998, and 2007/8. She won The International Fish Poetry Prize in 2010, and has been awarded an artist’s residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais for spring of 2013 to work on a new collection of poems.
She is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review (Nos. 57–60). She has worked as Writer in Residence for the City of Dublin (1994), and at the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature, University College, Dublin (2002). She has also worked as guest writer at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, and leads workshops in Poetry at the Irish Writers Centre.
She has given readings at Ireland House in New York University, at Boston College, at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and at many Irish Studies Centres, Art Centres and festivals including The London Irish Book Fair.
Books
She has published This Hour of the Tide (Salmon, 1994); the blue globe (1998), One Room an Everywhere, a novel, (2003), Suntrap (2007), with Blackstaff Press and The Invisible Threshold is due from Dedalus Press, in September 2012.
About MacCarthy, the poet Eamon Grennan has said, “her poems reveal an imagination aware of the strength and delicacy of the body as well as how mind and body are in endless, responsive dialogue with each other.”
Catherine Phil MacCarthy lives in Sandymount, Dublin, with her husband and children and dog, Cara.