The trustees of the Ireland Chair of Poetry recently named Erin Halliday as the recipient of the 2016 Ireland Chair of Poetry bursary. The poet was nominated this Autumn by the then Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, and her nomination was welcomed and confirmed by the trustees of the Board of the Ireland Chair of Poetry at the end of the year.
The bursary is awarded annually to a poet of promise and enables the recipient to reside for a period of four weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan.
Erin Halliday was born in Belfast in 1982, and studied Classics and English at Queen’s University, before taking an MA in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. After a brief career in Horticulture, she returned to Queen’s to gain her Ph.D in Creative Writing, researching theories of translation with regard to Latin poetry.
Her poetry has appeared in Cyphers, FourXFour, Poetry & Audience, Poetry Proper, and The Yellow Nib. In 2012, her pamphlet ‘Chrysalis’ won the Templar Poetry Pamphlet & Collection Awards. In 2013, she received a Support for the Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to fund the completion of her first collection, ‘Pharmakon’, published by Templar in 2015. She was a 2015 recipient of the Arts Council’s ACES Award, which funded the commencement of work upon her second collection.
Erin is a teacher of English and Classical Civilisation. She lives in County Down and teaches at a local grammar school. Most recently, she was featured in Blackstaff Press’s 2016 ‘New Poets from the North of Ireland’ anthology, and ‘The Bangor Book’, a compilation of writing celebrating 25 years of the Aspects Literary Festival.
Speaking about her work Paula Meehan commented that ‘her poetry is erudite, passionate, powerful and achieved. She is a poet who serves language with great elan and with great integrity. The range of her skills, interests, themes and topics is both extensive and surprising; I have every confidence that she will develop into one of the finest poets of the rising generation’.
For further information please contact Niamh McCabe, Trust Administrator, The Ireland Chair of Poetry, c/o The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, 70 Merrion Square, D 2. by email irelandchairofpoetry@gmail.com