Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974, and completed a PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 2001 she won an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, These Days (Cape Poetry), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2004, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In the same year, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. Further collections from Cape Poetry include: Drives (2008); Profit and Loss (2011), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; The Radio (2017), which won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; and Taking Liberties (2023). She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast and was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Author photo © John Duncan