Justin Quinn

He received a doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, where his contemporaries included poets David Wheatley, Caitriona O'Reilly and Sinéad Morrissey, and now lives with his wife and sons in Prague.

He has published seven poetry collections: The 'O'o'a'a' Bird (1995), Privacy (1999), Fuselage (2002), Waves & Trees (2006), The Months (2009), Close Quarters (2011) and Early House (2015).

With David Wheatley, he was a founding editor of the influential journal Metre, which stressed internationalism and contributed to a burgeoning interest in formalism in Irish poetry.

It is characterised by a sensual lushness informed by an awareness of the violence of history, as inflected by the author's experiences of living in the Czech Republic.

In its mix of formalist sophistication and openness to experiment, Quinn's work confounds perceptions of Irish poetry as rigidly dichotomised between formal conservatism and 1930s-derived innovation, a distinctiveness confirmed by the editorial decision to award him the single largest share of the 2004 Bloodaxe anthology The New Irish Poets.