Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1993 (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
9 items
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Seán Lysaght was born in 1957 and grew up in Limerick. He was educated at UCD, where he received a BA and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. He spent several years in Switzerland and Germany before returning to Ireland to teach and pursue further studies at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. In 1996, he received a PhD for his biographical study of Irish natural historian Robert Lloyd Praeger, which was published two years later by the Four Courts Press as Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist. He now lives in Westport and lectures at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.
Lysaght’s early ventures into poetry won acknowledgment in 1975 at the North Cork Writers’ Festival in Doneraile, where he received first prize in the under 18 category with his poems 'The Geese', 'Sacrilege' and 'They Cast off Youth'. He also won an award at the annual Patrick Kavanagh poetry festival in 1985. Lysaght’s first collection of poems, Noah’s Irish Ark, was published in 1989 by the Dedalus Press. His second collection, The Clare Island Survey (Gallery, 1991) was nominated for The Irish Times/ Aer Lingus poetry award. In 2007, Lysaght received the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. His work draws heavily on the natural world, combined with allusions to literature and legend. According to Lysaght, ‘poetry should be a negotiation between what we know to be our limits and the revelation of something we didn’t even realise was there in the first place.’
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Letters from John Wilson Fowler, poet, artist and lecturer in the English language and literature at the University of Stuttgart, Gauss-Strasse 7, 7000 Stuttgart 1, Germany, mainly discussing the technical aspects of writing relating to his own poetic works. Attached to the letters are typescript copies of two epic poems, 'The Conversion of Pilate, or How the Grail Left Palestine' and 'The Dove and the Tree' and handwritten notes relating to the former.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
The material has been arranged chronologically by date.
Conditions of access and use area
Conditions governing access
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
- Béarla