Snail In My Prime

Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His first book, Endsville (1967), has been followed by more than twenty others, including The Berlin Wall Café (a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985), Daddy, Daddy (winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990), Crazy About Women (1991), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Give Me Your Hand (1994), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), The Art of Life (2004), The Laughter of Mothers (2007), Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967–2007 (2009), Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012), and The Days of Surprise (2015). In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. He was conferred with a DLitt by Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and by University College Dublin in 2011. In 2014 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Irish Book Award. He is a member of Aosdána.

"To have heard him adds another pleasure to the reading of the work- but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are" -- Carol Ann Duffy Guardian "Durcan's... tall stories, dialogues and choruses, remind us that poetry can have popular reach and embody a genuinely countrywide spirit, without sacrificing integrity" -- Glyn Maxwell Independent on Sunday "Durcan's mastery of tone, his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable, his hypnotic repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare to utter once, all help to give [his work] an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry" -- Brendan Kennnelly Irish Times "For him poetry is story-telling and his stories are told in a direct fashion that makes them totally accessible... Paul Durcan's poetry sings" -- Roger McGough Sunday Tribune "Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious" -- Terry Eagleton Stand