Gerald Dawe - Later Life and Work

Later Life and Work

In Galway, he met Dorothea Melvin, his future wife, and settled in east Galway with his family - Iarla and Olwen. His second collection, The Lundys Letter, was published in 1985 and was awarded the prestigious Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. The collection was concerned with the cultural and social roots of his background in Belfast and of the different Northern Irish and emigre histories of his own family, highlighted by his new life in the west of Ireland.

His subsequent volumes, Sunday School (1991) and Heart of Hearts (1995) developed and deepened this exploration of the cultural diversity of Northern Ireland's cultural inheritance as seen through the lifestyle and customs of one family. In 1988 he was appointed Lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin and for the next five years commuted between his home in Galway and work in Dublin before the family moved to Dublin in 1992.

Dawe was appointed a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2004 and has also held visiting professorships at Boston College and Villanova University in the US as well as receiving International Writers' Fellowships from Hawthorden (UK) and Ledig Roholt foundation in Switzerland. His recent collections - The Morning Train (1999), Lake Geneva (2003) and Points West (2008) - mark an important departure from the Irish settings and primary concerns of his earlier work and established Dawe as a significant European poet in both range and reference, confirmed by the publication of Selected Poems (2012).

He has given numerous readings and lectures in many parts of the world and during the political upheavals in former East Europe was a regular contributor to festivals and conferences organised by The British Council, among others. A volume of his selected poems appeared in German in 2007 and he has also been translated into French and Japanese, while he co-translated into English the early poems of the Sicilian poet and Nobel laureate, Salvatore Quasimodo.

Dawe has published extensively on Irish poetry and cultural issues, much of which is collected in his four prose works: The Proper Word: Collected Criticism and My Mother-City (both 2007); The World as Province: Selected Prose 1980-2008(2009) and 'Conversations:Poets & Poetry' (2011). He has lived for many years in County Dublin with his wife, Dorothea, who was chairperson of the Irish-British 'think-tank', Encounter, director of the cultural resource body, Cultures of Ireland and head of public affairs at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey, during the late 1990s. Dawe is the inaugural director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, where he directs the graduate writing programme, and Professor in English with the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.