Gail McConnell

© Tim Millen

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. Her first poetry book, The Sun is Open, about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. It was a Poetry Book of the Month in the Guardian and in The Observer, a book of the year in the TLS and The White Review, and a poetry book of the year in The Telegraph and The Irish Times. 

Gail has also published an academic monograph, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, and two poetry pamphlets – Fourteen, a collection of creaturely poems on survival, repair, love and IVF, and Fothermather, an exploration of queerness, parenthood, play and attachment beyond the categories of ‘mother’ and father’. She has made arts features for BBC Radio 4 on her poetry (The Open Box and Fothermather) and on Seamus Heaney and the Troubles and has written essays for BBC Radio 3 and RTÉ. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.