Pat Boran to receive 2008 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry

Dedalus Press poet and publisher Pat Boran has been announced as the recipient of the 2008 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Irish poet Pat Boran of Dublin will receive the twelfth annual Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry of the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies.

Boran will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 11, in the auditorium of the John Roach Center on St. Thomas' St. Paul campus. The reading, free and open to the public, will cap a week of events, classroom visits and public appearances by the poet.

Boran will also participate in a public conversation with poet Jim Moore of Hamline University on the topic of “The Poet At Home: Finding the Universal in the Local.” The event begins at 7 p.m. Monday, April 7, at the Highland Park Branch Library Auditorium, 1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul. Moore is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press, 2007), and has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, The Loft, and the Bush Foundation. Both events are co-sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, a non-profit group that advocates for the library.

The $5,000 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, established in 1997, honors Irish poets. The award is named for Lawrence O'Shaughnessy, who taught English at St. Thomas from 1948 to 1950, formerly served on the university's board of trustees and has recently retired as head of the I.A. O'Shaughnessy Foundation.

Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland in 1963 and currently lives in Dublin, where he has been Writer-in-Residence with Dublin City Libraries, Dublin Corporation and Dublin City University. Until recently program director of the Dublin Writers Festival, in 2005 he became director of the Dedalus Press. He has published four full-length collections of poetry, the first of which, The Unwound Clock, won the 1989 Patrick Kavanagh Award for an outstanding first book. It was followed by Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996) and, in 2001, As the Hand, the Glove, all published by the Dedalus Press. He is also the author of a book of short fiction for children, All the Way from China (Poolbeg Press, 1998) and two nonfiction works, The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (revised edition, New Island, 2005) and A Short History of Dublin (Marino/Mercier Press, 2000). Boran also regularly reviews for Irish newspapers and literary journals. In 2005, Salt Publishing in the UK published his New and Selected Poems, reissued last year by Dedalus.

Boran writes frequently about his childhood in a quiet Irish town and of the suggestion of mystery that can be found in daily routine. Dennis O’Driscoll, a past winner of the O’Shaughnessy award, says of Boran that he is “a spirited celebrator of the local and the known.”

Previous winners of the O'Shaughnessy Award are Eavan Boland, John F. Deane, Peter Sirr, Louis de Paor, Moya Cannon, Frank Orsmby, Thomas McCarthy, Michael Coady, Kerry Hardie, Dennis O’Driscoll and Seán Lysaght.

For more information, please contact Jim Rogers, managing director of the Center for Irish Studies, (651) 962-5662, or send electronic mail to jrogers@stthomas.edu.