Leontia Flynn

Life and Work

After leaving school, Flynn attended Trinity College Dublin to study English literature but dropped out after a year and moved to Belfast to focus on writing [1].  She graduated in English from Queen’s University, Belfast and moved to Edinburgh in 1998, where she took up a Master’s place in Writing and Cultural Politics at the University of Edinburgh but instead wrote the poems for her first book [2].  She returned to take up a funded PhD place at Queen’s University Belfast, on Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, and published her first book of poetry These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004) when it was completed.  After a period of travel and involvement with the Belfast arts collective, Factotum [3], she took up a post-doctoral Research Fellowship at Queen’s University in 2005.  Instead she published Drives (Jonathan Cape, 2008), and Profit and Loss (written during pregnancy and the early infancy of baby daughter) [4].  Her monograph about trying to make sense of Medbh McGuckian’s poetry in light of feminist theory was eventually published by Irish Academic Press in 2014 [5].  In 2016, after ten years as a research fellow at The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s, she became a lecturer. [6]

Work: Prizes

These Days won an Eric Gregory Award in manuscript in 2001, the Forward Prize for Best first collection in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. In the same year she was named one of twenty ‘Next Generation poets’ by the Poetry Book Society [7]. Flynn received The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland after Drives. Profit and Loss was Poetry Book Society choice for Autumn 2013, and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.  Flynn won the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature in 2011, and the Ireland Fund’s AWB Vincent Literary Award in 2014. [8

Critical Reception

Flynn’s work has been favourably reviewed by writers and critics. The Costa judges wrote ‘a breathtakingly accomplished debut, These Days transforms Flynn’s every day experiences into literary jewels.  She has exceptional insight and the writerly rigour of a poet many years her senior’[9] . Tom Paulin wrote ‘smart as a whip, lyrical, always on point, Leontia Flynn’s poems are the real, right thing’ [10].  Of Drives, Adam Philips wrote ‘Exact and casual and formally adept, a bit like an Irish (and female) Frank O’Hara, and not a bit like anyone else’ (Guardian: Books of the Year) [11]. Frances Leviston wrote ‘Mercifully, these poems are not ‘about’ peace treaties, or carbon-consciousness, but about the act of apprehension itself: how one navigates through culture, language, history, expectation, with both a brain and a sense of humour … Such currents of difficult feeling, behind the wise, glittering fronts of her poems, make them all the more remarkable’ [12].  Of Profit and Loss, Sarah Wardle wrote in Poetry Review ‘An outstanding Audenesque long poem, ‘Letter to Friends’ makes this book essential reading, as it brilliantly captures the zeitgeist…’[13] Bernard O’Donoghue wrote in TLS Books of the Year ‘My favourite book was Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn (Cape), demonstrating her unrivalled capacity as a good-humoured but devastating observer of the modern secular scene. ‘Letter to Friends’, Flynn’s long poem about the way we live now, is a masterpiece’ [14]. In the Irish Times, Philip Coleman wrote Flynn’s place as one of the strongest and most skillful poetic voices of her generation is confirmed in Profit and Loss… [In ‘Letter to Friends’] Like Auden, she addresses important issues here in a language that is both playful and serious, and in a form that is, if not “large enough to swim in”, at least robust enough to contain the many concerns she raises in it, from the delights and torments of personal and familial memory to the function and value of poetry in (postmodern) society’.[15]

Themes and Influences

Flynn has written about as family and psychological inheritance, as well as about her father’s Alzheimer’s disease. [16]. Her poems also sometimes address technology.  She has described the sonnets in Drives as ‘wikipedia poems’ [17].  Profit and Loss contains a poem about a floppy disk, and ‘Letter to Friends’ contains lines about the rise of social media:

But this is our life, half virtual, half flesh:

the instant message and the feedback loop:

the tailored advertisement made afresh

with each mouse-click – the generally crap

factoids and news-lite that we read online…

(… and yet… and yet a mob’s

no less a mob well fed and disciplined,

as Eliot wrote, but that’s a different story).

She has questioned the postmodern style inherited from the generation of Northern Irish poets preceding her in an essay for The Edinburgh Review (‘What do I know’) [18]. In an essay on Seamus Heaney in The Irish University Review 2014/15 she drew a connection between the fragmentation of postmodern poetry and the fragmentation in communication brought about by social media [19].  She gave a lecture on Poetry and the Digital revolution at the 2016 John Hewitt summer school. [20]

Personal Life

Leontia Flynn met and married Philip McGowan, a lecturer in American literature, in 2007. Their baby daughter Minnie was born in April 2008. They separated in 2016.