John Montague was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1929 and educated in Northern Ireland, Dublin and the US. He has taught in France, in America (most recently as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the New York State Writers Institute) and in Ireland (at UCD and UCC).
His major publications include The Rough Field, The
Great Cloak, The Dead Kingdom, Mount Eagle and
Smashing the Piano. His collections of stories include
Death of a Chieftain.
His Collected Poems appeared in 1995, the year he received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Other recent Gallery Books include Drunken Sailor (2004), In My Grandfather's Mansion (2010) and Speech Lessons (2011). In 1998 he became the first Ireland Professor of Poetry, and in 2010 the French State honoured him as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
