Gerald Dawe (22 April 1952 – 29 May 2024) was an Irish poet, academic and literary critic.

Life and career

Gerald Dawe was born in north Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up with his mother, sister, and grandmother. He lived mostly in the Skegoniell area and attended Seaview Primary School and then Orangefield Boys Secondary School across the city in East Belfast. While at school, he participated in the Lyric Youth Theatre under the teacher and theatre director, Sam McCready. He also started to write poems and after a brief period living in London, he returned to the North and attended the College of Business Studies before proceeding to the fledgling New University of Ulster (1971-1974) where his professor was the literary critic and novelist, Walter Allen. At the university he was associated with the so-called Coleraine Cluster of poets and writers. In 1974, he graduated receiving a B.A.(Hons) in English. After graduation, Dawe worked briefly as an assistant librarian at the Fine Arts department, in the Central Library in Belfast before being awarded a Major State Award for Postgraduate Research from the Department of Education, Northern Ireland. He then proceeded to the University of Galway where he undertook graduate research on the 19th-century Tyrone novelist and short story writer, William Carleton. He also started to lecture in the Department of English at the university. In Galway, he met Dorothea Melvin, his future wife, and settled in east Galway with his family – Iarla and Olwen. In 1988 he was appointed Lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin and for the next five years commuted between his home in Galway and work in Dublin before the family moved to Dublin in 1992. He was appointed a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2004, a Professor in English and the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing (1997-2015). He retired from Trinity College Dublin in 2017. He also held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the United States as well as receiving International Writers' Fellowships from the Hawthorden Foundation (UK) and the Ledig Roholt Foundation Switzerland. Dawe lived in Dun Laoghaire with his wife, Dorothea, who was chairperson of the 'think-tank', Encounter, director of the cultural resource body, Cultures of Ireland and head of public affairs at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey, during the late 1990s and a board member of the Irish Association. Dawe died at his home in Dun Laoghaire, on 29 May 2024, at the age of 72.

Work

His first full collection, Sheltering Places, was published in 1978, receiving two years later, a Bursary for Poetry from the Arts Council of Ireland. His second collection, The Lundys Letter, was published in 1985 and was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. The collection was concerned with the cultural and social roots of his background in Belfast and of the different Irish and emigre histories of his own family, highlighted by his new life in the west of Ireland. Around 1990, he co-founded Lagan Press with Fortnight magazine manager Patrick Ramsey (absorbed by the Verbal Arts Centre in 2013). Dawe's How's the Poetry Going?: Literary Politics & Ireland Today (1991) was the new publisher's first book. Over the next thirty years he published several books of poetry with Gallery Press. These included Sunday School (1991), Heart of Hearts (1995), The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008) and 'Mickey Finn's Air' (2014). In addition, several selections of his poetry were published. He also edited several collections of contemporary Irish poets and co-translated (with Marco Sonzogni) into English the early poems of the Sicilian poet and Nobel laureate, Salvatore Quasimodo. In 2024 a selection of his poems in translation entitled Versions, Selected Poems by Gerald Dawe in translation, edited by Florence Impens was published. He also published works on Irish poetry and cultural issues, much of which is collected in his prose works: The Proper Word: Collected Criticism (2007), Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015), In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast (2017) and The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018).

Critical perspective

Publications

Poetry

Essays

As editor

As Co-editor

Film

Prizes and awards

Distinctions

Interviews