Liam Ó Muirthile

Liam Ó Muirthile was a prominent Irish-language poet and journalist who also wrote plays and novels. Ó Muirthile originally came to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork who collaborated on the journal Innti in the late 1960s.

Ó Muirthile has been described as a poet of immense formal and musical mastery who read deeply in the classical and neo-classical poetry of the Irish language. He studied French literature as a student and later translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert and Anne Hébert. His first collection of poetry was Tine Chnámh (1984), for which he received the Irish American Cultural Institute’s literary award and an Oireachtas prize for poetry. He subsequently published a number of other collections. In 1996 he received the Butler Award for his novel Ar Bhruach na Laoi. Several plays by him have been staged. 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.