Greg Delanty facts for kids

Greg Delanty, born in 1958, is a well-known poet from Ireland. He is famous for his poems, and a British magazine called Agenda even dedicated a whole issue to him!

Early Life and Learning

Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland. While he is known as an Irish poet, he also spends most of his time in America. He lives in Vermont and works as a poet at Saint Michael's College. In 1994, he became an American citizen but also kept his Irish citizenship. He used to be the president of a group called the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

The Irish writer Colum McCann once called Delanty the "poet laureate of the contemporary Irish-in-America." This means he is like the official poet for Irish people who have moved to America. McCann said that Delanty has written about a whole generation of people and their experiences of living away from home.

College Days

Greg Delanty went to University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland. There, he learned from famous poets like Sean Lucy and John Montague. Many other talented writers also studied at UCC around the same time, including Maurice Riordan, Gregory O'Donoghue, Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Gerry Murphy, and Seán Dunne. Poets who wrote in the Irish language, such as Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Louis DePaor, and Colm Breathnach, were also very important to him.

Writing Journey

While at UCC, Greg Delanty was the editor of the university magazine called Quarryman. He published his first poems in The Cork Examiner. As an editor, he was the first in Ireland to publish poems in both Irish and English without translations. He also asked other students and poets from Ireland and beyond, like Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan, to share their poems.

First Books and Awards

In 1983, Greg Delanty won the important Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. This award is given to an Irish poet who has not yet published a book. In 1986, his first full book of poems, Cast in the Fire, was released. That same year, he received the Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship. This award gave him money and required him to travel to the United States for a short time.

Since 1987, Delanty has worked at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. He started as a teacher and is now the poet-in-residence. Here, his poems began to explore themes of being away from home and family. His collection American Wake (1995) imagined a special Irish place where all people living in other countries would naturally land.

His book The Hellbox (1998) got its name from the printing trade, which was his father's job. The Blind Stitch (2001) included poems about India. The Ship of Birth (2007) was inspired by becoming a father and celebrated the ongoing flow of life. His Collected Poems 1986-2006 was published in 2006.

Later Works and Themes

After his Collected Poems 1986-2006, Greg Delanty started to write in new ways and about new topics. His book The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (2012 in England, 2015 in the U.S.) used an old Greek poetry style to look at our modern world.

He also wrote The New Citizen Army, a book of political poems about war and climate change. The covers of this book were even made from old uniforms of US soldiers! The book Loosestrife (2011) included many of the same poems.

Delanty was the main poet in an anthology called So Little Time: Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis (2014). The environmentalist Bill McKibben suggested the book should be based on Delanty's poems. Delanty then invited many other poets to join the project.

Bill McKibben called him "The great Vermont poet." In 2006, The Sunday Times newspaper said that Greg Delanty's poems mix political ideas with quiet thoughts.

Published Poems and Translations

Greg Delanty's poems are found in many different collections from America, Ireland, Italy, England, Australia, Japan, and Argentina. Some of these include the Norton Introduction to Poetry and The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry. His individual poems have appeared in magazines like The Atlantic, The New Statesman, and The Irish Times.

He also helped edit The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (2010) with Michael Matto. This book was very popular.

Delanty has translated poems by other writers, including Seán Ó Ríordáin and Kyriakos Charalambides. He also translated two ancient Greek plays: Aristophanes’ ‘The Knights’, which he called ‘The Suits’, and Euripides’ ‘Orestes’.

He co-edited Jumping Off Shadows: Selected Contemporary Irish Poetry (1995) and The Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin (1995). He has given many readings of his poems in the United States and Europe, including at the Library of Congress.

Many of his poems have been played on radio and television, from Garrison Kellior’s The Writer's Almanac to the BBC and Radio Teilifis Éireann (Irish National TV and Radio). He has also been interviewed many times.

The National Library of Ireland has collected Greg Delanty's papers up to 2010.

Awards and Honors

Greg Delanty has received many awards for his poetry. These include:

• The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award (1983)
• The Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986)
• The Wolfers-O’Neill Award (1996–97)
• The Austin Clarke Award (1996)
• National Poetry Competition Prizewinner (Poetry Society of England, 1999)
• An Arts Council of Ireland Bursary (1998–99)
• An award from the Royal Literary Fund (1999)

He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry in 2007–2008, which is a very important award given to people who are doing excellent work in their fields.