Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945, later moving to Manchester. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder (Chatto & Windus), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and Farmers Cross (Faber & Faber), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics, 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber & Faber. The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber & Faber) was published in 2016; since it was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, he has published The Anchorage (Faber & Faber, 2025). He lives in Oxford. Author photo © William Parry