Gerry Hanberry

Life and career

Gerard Hanberry has published four collections of poetry to date and also a biography of the Wilde family, More Lives Than One - The Remarkable Wilde Family Through the Generations (Collins Press, 2011). His most recent poetry collection is 'What Our Shoes Say About Us' published by Salmon Poetry in July 2014. This follows the collection 'At Grattan Road' published by Salmon Poetry in 2009. Paul Perry, reviewing the collection 'At Grattan Road' for the Irish Times, said it was "bursting at the seams with fine poems". Hanberry's first collection, Rough Night, was published in 2002 by Stonebridge Publications, Wales. This was followed in 2005 by Something Like Lovers, also from Stonebridge Publications. In the Summer of 2004 Hanberry won the Brendan Kennelly/Sunday Tribune Poetry Award. His book on the women who inspired some great Irish love songs - 'On Raglan Road - Irish Love Songs and the Women Who Inspired Them' is to be published by The Collins Press on 30 September 2016. Hanberry’s poetry has been published widely in many literary journals and newspapers in Ireland and further afield and he has been shortlisted for many of Ireland’s top poetry prizes, including a Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Award in 2000, Strokestown Prize 2003 and RTÉ’s Rattlebag Poetry Slam 2003. He won the Galway City and Co. Council's Poetry Award for National Poetry Day 2009 (the poem can be read at the external link for Galway Advertiser below and is now in his most recent collection). In 2000 he won the Originals Short Story prize in Listowel Writers' Week. An early draft of his biography of Oscar Wilde and his extraordinary family More Lives Than One was shortlisted for the Kingston University Non-Fiction Prize. He has been invited to read and deliver workshops at many literature festivals and been broadcast on Lyric FM, Galway Bay FM, Newstalk, Midwest Radio, Cape Cod Radio in the US, Ireland's RTÉ and in Australia. His poems have appeared on Dublin's Dart, the Irish equivalent of Poems on the Underground and have also been included in various anthologies including 'Windharp - Poems of Ireland since 1916' published by Penguin Ireland. Hanberry's work has been translated into various languages and in March 2016 Italian poetry magazine 'Poesia' included eighteen of his poems in a major feature article.

Hanberry holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he teaches a Creative Writing course to undergraduates. He is also a teacher of English at St. Enda's College, Salthill. He was a journalist during the 1980s and 1990s, writing a weekly column for the Galway Observer under the name "Joe Barry". In addition he performs regularly as a singer-songwriter and is the singer/acoustic guitarist with the band The Atlantic Rhythm Section. He runs occasional creative writing and poetry appreciation workshops and delivers talks on his non=fiction works around the country.