Padraic Colum (8 December 1881 – 11 January 1972) was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore.

Colum finished school the following year and at the age of seventeen, he passed an exam for and was awarded a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House.

[citation needed] During this period, Colum started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ.

During the riots caused by the Abbey Theatre's production of The Playboy of the Western World Colum's own father, Patrick Columb, was one of the protesters.

His first play, Broken Soil (revised as The Fiddler's House) (1903) was performed by W. G. Fay's Irish National Dramatic Company.

He published several poems in Arthur Griffith's paper, The United Irishman this time, with The Poor Scholar bringing him to the attention of WB Yeats.

In a letter to the Irish Times in April 1970, he claimed to be the author of the words of "She Moved Through the Fair" (the music being composed by Herbert Hughes), using only a single verse from an old County Donegal folk song.

[9] In the same correspondence, however, another music collector, Proinsias Ó Conluain, said he had recorded a "very old" song from Glenavy with words the same as the other three verses of "She Moved Through the Fair".

[10] In 1911, with Mary Gunning Maguire, a student from UCD, and David Houston and Thomas MacDonagh, he founded the short-lived literary journal The Irish Review, which published work by Yeats, George Moore, Oliver St John Gogarty, and many other leading Revival figures.

After it was published in the New York Tribune, Hungarian Illustrator Willy Pogany suggested the possibility of a book collaboration, so Colum wove the folktale into a long, epic story.

A first edition of the first volume (At the Gateways of the Day) was presented to US president Barack Obama by Taoiseach Enda Kenny on the occasion of his visit to Dublin, Ireland on 23 May 2011.

The Colums spent the years from 1930 to 1933 living in Paris and Nice, where Padraic renewed his friendship with James Joyce and became involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake.

In 1965, Colum sold the notebooks, manuscripts, galley proofs, and letters that were in his apartments in New York and Dublin to the Binghamton University Libraries.