Liam Ó Muirthile (15 November 1950 – 18 May 2018)[1][2] was a prominent Irish-language poet who also wrote plays and novels, he was also a journalist.
Ó Muirthile originally came to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork who collaborated in the journal Innti in the late 1960s.
He was a member of a group of poets at University College Cork in the late 1960s who chose Irish as a creative medium and were closely associated with the modernist poetry journal Innti, founded by fellow poet Michael Davitt (1950–2005).
[4] Greg Delanty, writing for Poetry International, claimed that a fundamental achievement of Ó Muirthile and other members of the Innti group was to adapt the language to a contemporary urban landscape in a way that reflected the counterculture of the sixties.
[5] Ó Muirthile has been described as a poet of immense formal and musical mastery who read deeply into the classical and neo-classical poetry of the Irish language.
He translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert and Anne Hébert.
This received the Irish American Cultural Institute’s literary award and an Oireachtas prize for poetry.
In 1996 he received the Butler Award for his novel Ar Bhruach na Laoi.
From 1989 to 2003 he wrote a weekly column, “An Peann Coitianta,” for the Irish Times.
Poems by him have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian.
Revised and adapted for stage by Liam Ó Muirthile and Michael Scott.