Boyne Readings - Kieran Furey

Our Boyne Readings and Open Mic start their 2011 season on this Thursday evening 8pm at the Village Hall, Knightsbridge Retirement village, Trim. The featured Reader is Roscommon man Kieran Furey. His biography so far is impressive:

Kieran Furey was born in Curraghroe, Co Roscommon, in 1953, and grew up there. He now lives in Longford. He has spent about a quarter of his life in rural Ireland, a quarter in provinical towns, a quarter in Dublin, and a quarter abroad: mainly in Latin America (where he taught English in Ecuador and Nicaragua, did voluntary work in Cuba, and travelled widely in Brazil), but also in Africa, India, Greece, the UK and the United States.

He has been writing poetry, and a little prose, for three decades. His first book, Nobody's Neighbours, was published by Veritas in Dublin in 1979. During the 1980s and early 1990s he went on to self-publish twenty books or booklets of poetry, short stories, travel experiences and humour. These sold in total about twenty-five thousand copies. He knows this because he sold them all himself, in Dublin pubs and at arts, music and other festivals all over the country.

He has also published nearly a hundred poems in magazines and newspapers, and has read his poetry in public many times: in Athlone, Boyle, Belfast, Bray, Dublin, Lanesborough, Longford, Portlaoise, Toronto, and Quito (Ecuador). He has also read his work on radio in Longford, New York and Quito.

Prizes won include the Spanish Language Category of the Dun Laoghaire International Feile Filiochta Poetry Competition (twice: in 1998 and 2006); the overall Poem of Europe award in the 2006 Feile Filiochta (coming first out of 6,176 poems in ten languages); the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award 2002 (Traditional Category); the George Moore Gold Medal for Poetry, 2003; the Riposte Poem of the Year Competition in 2002; and the William Allingham Short Story Competition in 1983.