John Montague

John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929 and educated in Northern Ireland, Dublin and the US. He has taught in France, America and in Ireland (at UCD and UCC). He co-founded Claddagh Records, and became president of Poetry Ireland in 1979. His major poetry publications include The Rough Field, The Great Cloak, The Dead Kingdom, Mount Eagle, Time in Armagh and Smashing the Piano. Other recent Gallery Books include Drunken Sailor (2004) and Speech Lessons (2011). His New Collected Poems was published in 2012. John Montague’s Collected Poems appeared in 1995, the year he received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Winner of the Marten Toonder Award in 1977, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980, and the Ireland Funds Literary Award in 1995. In 1998 John Montague became the first Ireland Professor of Poetry, and in 2010 the French State honoured him as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He is also the author of the story collections Berkeley’s Telephone and Other Fictions (2000), An Occasion of Sin (1992) and Death of a Chieftain (1964), as well as the novella The Lost Notebook (1987), the essay collection The Figure in the Cave (1989), and the memoirs Company (2001) and Born in Brooklyn (1991). John Montague is a member of Aosdána (the Irish Association to honour artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland). He is married to the novelist Elizabeth Wassell and they share their time between homes in Cork and Nice.