Irish Writers Online / Author
John Montague
John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929 and reared on the family farm in Co Tyrone.
His poetry includes Forms of Exile (1958); Poisoned Lands (Dublin, The Dolmen Press, 1961, 1977); A Chosen Light (1967); Tides (The Dolmen Press, 1971); (The Rough Field (Dolmen, 1972); A Slow Dance (Dolmen, 1975); The Great Cloak (Dolmen, 1978); The Dead Kingdom (Dolmen, 1984); Mount Eagle (Gallery Books, Co Meath/Wake Forest University Press, Winston Salem, 1989); The Love Poems (Exile
Editions, Toronto, 1992; Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 1993); Time in Armagh (a sequence) (Gallery Press, 1993); Collected
Poems (Gallery Books/Wake Forest University Press, 1995); Smashing the Piano (Gallery Books, 1999); and Drunken Sailor (Gallery Books, 2004).
His fiction includes The Lost Notebook (Mercier Press, Cork, 1987); and
the short stories An Occasion of Sin (Exile Editions, Toronto/ White Pine Press, Buffalo, 1992).
His essay collections are The Figure in
The Cave (Dolmen/Syracuse University Press, 1989); and Born in Brooklyn [selected American writings] (White Pine Press, 1992).
He has published two volumes of autobiography: Company (London, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2001); and
and The Pear is Ripe: A Memoir (Dublin, Liberties Press, 2007).
He has edited Bitter Harvest, an anthology of Irish Poetry (Scribners, New York, 1989).
Among numerous prizes and honours, he has received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award (1995).
The inaugural Ireland Professor of Poetry, he is a member of
Aosdána and lives in County Cork.
