Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928. He attended University College, Dublin, entering the Civil Service in 1946. He has taught in the United States and established and administered the Irish Tradition study programme in Dublin, retiring in 1992. He was a director of the Dolmen Press and Cuala Press, Dublin, and in 1972 established Peppercanister Press. He is best known as a major poet (published by Dolmen, Peppercanister and Oxford University Press), a translator (of The Tain and Poems of the Dispossessed) and a radical anthologist (of the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse). His most recent book of poems, From Centre City, was published in 1994 by Oxford.

'Thomas Kinsella is the most important and the most compendious Irish poet since Yeats.' - Thomas H. Jackson, 'The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella' 'Among those poets writing in English today there is none surpassing Thomas Kinsella.' - Canadian Journal of Irish Studies