Leontia Flynn (born December 1974) is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.

Life and work

Leontia Flynn was born in Downpatrick, Co Down and grew up between Dundrum and Newcastle, Co Down. She attended Assumption Grammar School, Ballynahinch and afterwards began an English degree at Trinity College Dublin before dropping out. She completed a degree and later a PhD in English at Queen's University Belfast, and an MSc in writing and cultural politics at Edinburgh University. She is a professor at Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University where she has worked since 2005.^[1]

Themes and influences

Flynn has written about family and psychological inheritance, as well as about her father's Alzheimer's disease.^[2] Her poems also sometimes address technology. She has described the sonnets in Drives as ‘wikipedia poems’.^[3] Profit and Loss contains a poem about a floppy disk, and ‘Letter to Friends’ contains lines about the rise of social media:

But this is our life, half virtual, half flesh:
the instant message and the feedback loop:
the tailored advertisement made afresh
with each mouse-click – the generally crap
factoids and news-lite that we read online...
(... and yet... and yet a mob's
no less a mob well fed and disciplined,
as Eliot wrote, but that's a different story).

Critical reception

Flynn's work has been favourably reviewed by writers and critics. The Costa judges described These Days as "a breathtakingly accomplished debut, These Days transforms Flynn's every day experiences into literary jewels. She has exceptional insight and the writerly rigour of a poet many years her senior." Tom Paulin wrote "smart as a whip, lyrical, always on point, Leontia Flynn's poems are the real, right thing."^[4]

Of Drives, Adam Philips wrote. "Exact and casual and formally adept, a bit like an Irish (and female) Frank O'Hara, and not a bit like anyone else" (Guardian: Books of the Year). Frances Leviston wrote "Mercifully, these poems are not 'about' peace treaties, or carbon-consciousness, but about the act of apprehension itself: how one navigates through culture, language, history, expectation, with both a brain and a sense of humour ... Such currents of difficult feeling, behind the wise, glittering fronts of her poems, make them all the more remarkable."^[5]

In Poetry Review, Sarah Wardle called 'Profit and Loss', "[a]n outstanding Audenesque long poem ... [which] makes this book essential reading, as it brilliantly captures the zeitgeist...'" Bernard O'Donoghue wrote in TLS Books of the Year, "My favourite book was Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn (Cape), demonstrating her unrivalled capacity as a good-humoured but devastating observer of the modern secular scene. 'Letter to Friends', Flynn's long poem about the way we live now, is a masterpiece.".

In The Irish Times, Philip Coleman posited that Flynn's place as one of the strongest and most skillful poetic voices of her generation, Reviewing 'Profit and Loss', Coleman writes that "Like Auden, she addresses important issues here in a language that is both playful and serious, and in a form that is, if not 'large enough to swim in', at least robust enough to contain the many concerns she raises in it, from the delights and torments of personal and familial memory to the function and value of poetry in (postmodern) society."^[6]

In The Dublin Review of Books, Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado described The Radio as 'a triumph of poetic innovation that signals Flynn's capacity to listen amidst the din of contemporary life and record its low, lyric thrum'.^[7] In The Irish Times, John McAuliffe wrote of Flynn’s fourth collection as ‘agonised, gabby, curt, meditative, cruel (and self-lacerating, too), smart and smarting, funny and, when she tells them, serious about the butts of her jokes… The Radio is an outstanding book from a poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation’.^[8]

In The Observer, where The Radio was Book of the Month, Kate Kellaway wrote: ‘Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance… I kept returning to poems for the sheer pleasure of them – no slog involved’.^[9] In The Irish Times Summer Reading, Kevin Barry wrote ‘Leontia Flynn’s The Radio is a brilliant and challenging collection, a set of poems that truly cuts beneath the skin – she is, to use that ever-golden phrase, a poet approaching the peak of her powers’.

Prizes

These Days won an Eric Gregory Award in manuscript in 2001,^[10] the Forward Prize for Best first collection in 2004^[11] and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.^[12]

In the same year Flynn was named one of twenty ‘Next Generation poets’ by the Poetry Book Society.^[13] Flynn received The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature,^[14] in 2008. Profit and Loss was Poetry Book Society choice for Autumn 2013 and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Flynn won the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature in 2011, and the prestigious Ireland Fund's AWB Vincent Literary Award in 2014. The Radio was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and won the Irish Times's Poetry Now award.^[15] Flynn was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award For Poetry Pamphlets for her 2021 pamphlet "Nina Simone is Singing".

In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.^[16]

Personal life

Leontia Flynn is separated and lives in Belfast, with her daughter.

Books

See also

• Factotum (arts organisation)

External links

• Official website
• British Council profile

References