For the Present – Celebrating Michael Donaghy

For the Present – Celebrating Michael Donaghy

Join us to celebrate the legacy of the great Michael Donaghy in an evening of poetry and music in association with The Poetry Society and kindly supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation.

Featuring an all-star line up of poets with readings from: Kayo Chingonyi, Ruairi Donaghy, Maura Dooley, Paul Farley, Kathryn Gray, Hannah Lowe, Andrew Neilson, Sean O’Brien, Don Paterson and Greta Stoddart, and performances from Irish traditional musicians.

2024 sees the 20th anniversary of the poet Michael Donaghy’s death and is the year in which he would have celebrated his 70th birthday. To commemorate these occasions, and to celebrate the growing influence his work has on a new generation of poets, we are hosting an evening of poetry with contributions from Michael’s contemporaries and admirers.

Michael was born in New York, studied in Chicago, and at the age of 30 moved to England, where he published three highly regarded collections of poetry: Shibboleth (OUP 1988), which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Errata (OUP 1993) which was selected for the Poetry Society New Generation promotion, and Conjure (2000 Picador) which won the Forward Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. A posthumous collection Safest (2005 Picador) was published after his untimely death from a brain haemorrhage at the age of fifty in 2004.

In addition to his own work, Michael was a renowned teacher of poetry writing - his classes at City University and Birkbeck College over the years produced a significant number of today’s best regarded poets and his influence continues to be felt throughout the poetry world. David Wheatley said of him that “Not since Sylvia Plath almost half a century ago had an American poet living in Britain so decisively entered the bloodstream of his times.”