Biographies

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Jim McPartlin

The artist Jim McPartlin is a native of Dublin who moved to Virginia with his wife Mary in 2004. He spent most of his working life as a graphic designer but has always had a passion for drawing and painting and started exhibiting in Dublin nearly 20 years ago. Since moving to Cavan, Jim has been working as a full-time artist, and has exhibited locally.  He says. ‘I suppose particularly because we are not commuting, we have a real connection with the county. Especially as an artist I love it, because most of the work I do is inspired by the Cavan landscape or Cavan scenes.’

Anthony J. Quinn

Anthony J Quinn, a native of County Tyrone is an experienced author and teacher at Queen’s University Belfast.    He worked as Writer in Residence for Northern Ireland Libraries in 2016 and 201.   He is the award winning author of nine novels. His debut novel Disappeared was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by The Sunday Times, was a Daily Mail Crime Novel of the Year, and was shortlisted by the book critics of the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle for a Strand Literary Award in the US. It was also selected as one of the top ten thrillers of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews and long-listed for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year.

Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with five published collections, the most recent being Keats Lives (Carcanet Press, Manchester). The mountains, the sea and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure too as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and our past. Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has always been a deep interest and is a constant theme. She has received the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2011. She has edited Poetry Ireland Review and is a member of Aosdána,the affiliation of Irish creative artists.

Pat Boran

PAT BORAN was born in Portlaoise and lives in Dublin. He has held a number of positions as Writer-in-Residence with public libraries/authorities and third level institutions in the city. He is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Writers Festival, a former presenter of both The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1.

Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989 he has published six full-length collections of poetry. Those books are: The Unwound Clock (1990), Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996), As the Hand, the Glove (2001), The Next Life (2012) and Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2015). His New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by the late Dennis O’Driscoll, was published in 2005 and since editions have appeared in Italian, Hungarian and Macedonia. In 2017 Orange Crate Books published A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems, updating and revising his previous selected poems in a pocket-sized format. In March 2019 Dedalus Press published his seventh collection, Then Again. He is a member of Aosdana.

Kate Ennals

Kate Ennals is a poet and writer and has published poems and short stories in a range of literary and on-line journals (Crannog, Skylight 47, Honest Ulsterman, The Moth, Anomaly, The International Lakeview Journal, Boyne Berries, North West Words, The Blue Nib, Dodging the Rain, The Ogham Stone, plus).In 2017, she won the Westport Arts Festival Poetry Competition. Her first collection of poetry At The Edge was published in 2015. Her second collection, Threads, was published in April 2018. She has lived in Ireland for 25 years and currently runs poetry and writing workshops in County Cavan. She hosts ‘At The Edge’, a literary reading evening, funded by Cavan Arts Office. She completed an MA in Writing at NUI Galway in 2012.

Danny Forde

Danny Forde is a singer-songwriter and composer hailing from Dublin. Vocal harmony, string quartets, fingerstyle guitar, and healing sounds feature strongly in all his music. Danny trained originally as a concert pianist, later cutting his teeth as a singer/guitarist with rock, folk, and funk bands, before diving into the world of film and theatre composition where boundaries between the art forms break down, all the while developing his song-writing craft and working in collaboration with some of Ireland’s finest and up-and-coming musicians including Bill Whelan, Loah, I Have A Tribe, Slow Skies, Trinity Orchestra, members of Kila, and Paul Brady.

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Belturbet Surgerypeter-murtaghs-logoCavan County Council