Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh is a poet from Ireland who writes exclusively in the Irish language. A bilingual collection, The Coast Road, was published by the Gallery Press in 2016, and includes English translations by thirteen poets. Her own translations from he French of Andrée Chedid were published in 2019. Among the awards her work has garnered are the Michael Hartnett Award and the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Prize, as well as bursaries from the Arts Council. She lectures in the Department of Modern Irish at University College Cork, and enjoys collaborating with musicians, dancers and artists.
Ní Ghearbhuigh's most recent collection, Tonn Teaspaigh agus Dánta Eile, ['Heat Wave and Other Poems'] was written in the fog of early motherhood. It was awarded the prestigious Oireachtas prize for best poetry collection in 2019. Daniela Theinová has said of this work: "The poems in Tonn Teaspaigh highlight and challenge what seems to be an endless supply of dichotomies, including those between life and decay, beginning and closure, growth and stasis, attachmment and separation, resilience and anguish, ofthen showing them to be aspects of the same binary experience."
photo courtesy of Máire Uí Mhacáin