Leeanne Quinn was born in 1978 in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Her debut collection of poetry, Before You, was published by Dedalus Press in 2012. The collection was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013.
Before You is a book about loss and memory. The poems explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, revisiting childhood memories following the death of the poet’s older sister. The collection also includes a long sequence of poems that engage with the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Poet Paul Perry says of the collection: “There’s a graceful and assured rigor to the lyrics in Leeanne Quinn’s Before You. … She is a poet of intimacy and quiet recollection, a poet who writes about loss with heartbreaking compassion. … Before You is a book of sparing and hard-earned poems; it is a wonderful achievement.” Reviewing Before You for The Stinging Fly, Lucy Collins wrote: “These are intimate and finely-tuned lyrics, observant of subjective states and patterns of shared experience… It marks a debut of considerable depth and maturity.” Tracy Youngblom, writing for the New Hibernia Review, called Before You a collection that “hums with an inner life."
Her second collection, Some Lives, was published by Dedalus Press in October 2020. Some Lives is a book about repeating cycles of violence in the 20th and 21st century, focusing in particular on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda, their friends and fellow-poets Marina Tsvetaeva, and Anna Akhmatova.
Her poems have been broadcast on RTÉ One radio and published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, and The Irish Times. Her work has also been widely anthologized and included in collections such as Niall MacMonagle’s Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916 (Penguin: 2015), the UNESCO Dublin: One City One Book title for 2014, If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Dedalus: 2014), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (Faber: 2012). In 2013 she was comissioned by Dublin City Council to write a poem about the Cathach of Colm Cille as part of the Colm Cille Spiral project organised by Derry City of Culture 2013.
Leeanne has twice been the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award for Literature (2018 & 2012). In August 2018 she spent two weeks as Writer in Residence at the Heinrich Böll cottage on Achill Island. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin, an MA from UCC, and a BA from UCD. Having lived in Dublin for most of her adult life, she recently relocated to Munich, Germany.
Author photo © Monika Chmielarz.