Lorna Shaughnessy is a poet, translator and academic. She has published four collections of poetry: Torching the Brown River (2008), Witness Trees (2011), Anchored (2015), and Lark Water (2021) with Salmon Poetry, and a chapbook, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (2005) with Lapwing Press. Born in Belfast, she now lives and works in Co Galway. She studied Spanish and English for her B.A. in Queen’s University Belfast. Her interest in Hispanic literatures, and particularly poetry, led her to specialise in Spanish poetry of the Generation of ’27 for her PhD. In 1986, she moved to Galway, discovered the unique landscapes of Conamara and the Burren, and has lived there ever since. She lectures in NUI-Galway in the Dept of Hispanic Studies, and has contributed to postgraduate programmes there in Creative Writing.
Contact with Spain, Mexico and Central America are central to her work, informing her creative practices as well as her academic research. She has translated Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry, including some of García Lorca’s ‘Gypsy Ballads’ in Lark Water, two collections of work by contemporary Mexican poets Pura López Colomé and María Baranda, (Arlen House), and two collections by Manuel Rivas (Shearsman Books). Along with poet-translators Keith Payne and Martín Veiga, she has co-edited A Different Eden. Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (Dedalus Press, Oct 2021).
She is the Director of Crosswinds: Irish and Galician Poetry and Translation, a collaboration of poets, translators and academics in Galicia and Ireland.
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Lorna Shaughnessy 