Greg Delanty

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Greg Delanty (born 1958) is a noted contemporary Irish poet.

Delanty won the National Poetry Competition in 1999 and was awarded the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry prize in 1996. He has received numerous other awards including the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1983), the Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Wolfers-O’Neill Award (1996-97), an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary (1998-99), and an award from the Royal Literary Fund (1999). ^[1]

Greg Delanty attended University College Cork (UCC) where he was taught by Sean Lucy and John Montague and was part of a stream of talent issuing from the university in that period, which included Maurice Riordan, Gregory O'Donoghue, Theo Dorgan, Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Gerry Murphy, Sean Dunne. At UCC Delanty edited the magazine Quarryman and published his first poems there and in The Cork Examiner.

His third collection dealt largely with the theme of emigration. It took its title from the Irish custom of hosting a gathering, both festive and mournful, on the eve of departing for America. The son of a printer, Delanty's fourth collection, The Hellbox, was based on the printing idiom he learnt from his father. The Blind Stitch was set in Ireland, America and India.

Delanty was born in Cork, Ireland in 1958, and is generally placed in the Irish tradition. However, he now lives for most of the year in America, where he teaches at St Michael's College, Vermont. He became an American citizen in 1994. Irish novelist Colum McCann, who has himself resettled in America, has described Delanty as the poet laureate of the contemporary Irish-in-America: “Delanty has catalogued an entire generation and its relationship to exile. He is the laureate of those who have gone.”