Trevor Joyce

For fifty years, since publication of his first book in 1967, Trevor Joyce has been a unique voice in Irish writing. His early work explored some possibilities of the lyric, and began a lifelong engagement with translation. In the mid-seventies he gave up publishing and turned instead to the study of Chinese poetry, while working as a systems analyst in industry. His later work, following twenty years silence, is unparalleled within Irish poetry. Successive books explore the possibilities of found text, computer-mediated composition, writing under constraint, and radical approaches to translation. Joyce co-founded, in Dublin, the New Writers' Press and its journal The Lace Curtain in the late sixties, and then the annual SoundEye Festival in Cork in the nineties. He has been included in representative anthologies, including the Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, and the OUP Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2002/3 and served as Visiting Fellow in Poetry to the University of Cambridge in 2009/10. He was elected to Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists, in 2004. In 2017 he was named by previous winner, the English poet Tom Raworth, as the latest recipient of the biennial N.C. Kaser award for poetry.