Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig is of Irish parentage but was born in London. He is the eighth of eleven children, and described scenes where his mother would recite verse by heart to the large congregated group of children. Duhig eschewed university and left school at 16, taking on casual jobs. He then spent fifteen years working with people in homeless shelters and drug-addiction centres in England and Northern Ireland before becoming a full-time writer. He often encouraged the people he worked with to use poetry as a means of coping with their problems.

He is currently a teacher of creative writing and lives in Leeds. 

Ian’s debut collection of poetry was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice, one of only two winners to do so.  The first winning poem was ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ in 1987, which addresses Lenin, Freud (“grow a beard, you think you\'re Moses”) and finally WB Yeats, to whom the title alludes. In 2001 he won the National Poetry Competition again with the enigmatic poem ‘The Lammas Hireling’ which also won the Forward Best Poem Prize. The Lammas Hireling, his fourth major collection, was widely hailed as his best collection so far and won a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Ian has also received an Arts Council Writers’ Award and a Cholmondeley Award. Carol Ann Duffy, the current UK Poet Laureate, called him “The most original poet of his generation.”

Ian Duhig’s next collection is forthcoming from Picador this September, provisionally entitled Jericho\'s Shanty. Bibliography

The Bradford Count, Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 1991

The Mersey Goldfish, Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 1995

Nominies, Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 1998

The Lammas Hireling, Picador, London, 2003

The Speed of Dark, Picador, London, 2007

Ian Duhig has also written libretti and musical adaptions, including Le Roman de Fauvel and Ludus Danielis.

Links

Duhig won the 1987 National Poetry Competition with his poem Nineteen hundred and Nineteen

Duhig won the Competition again in 2001 with his poem, The Lammas Hireling

A critical perspective

Hear Duhig read his poetry at The Poetry Archive

An interview with Ian Duhig at The Poetry Library

The Guardian interviews Duhig

Duhig’s publisher, Picador