Alice Lyons

  • PhD, creative writing, Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast 2014
  • MFA, painting, School for the Arts, Boston University, 1994
  • MSc, distinction, sociolinguistics, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 1986
  • BA, cum laude, European History, Connecticut College, 1982

Alice Lyons’s publications are Oona (Lilliput Press 2020), a work of prose, and three collections of poems: The Breadbasket of Europe (Veer Books 2016); speck: poems 2002-2006 (Lapwing 2015); Staircase Poems (The Dock 2006).

Among the awards and citations for her work are the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry (2002); the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary awarded by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (2004); Best Irish Animation, Galway Film Fleadh (2009); the Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship in Poetry, Harvard University (2015-2016) and the inaugural Heaney-Miłosz Residency in Kraków, Poland (2023).

Lyons teaches writing and creative practice in prose and poetry as well as modules on contemporary Irish literature. Her research interests include the productive tensions and intersections between poetic texts and images; animation, experimental film and lyric poetry (her dissertation thesis looked at experimental American filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s relation to lyric poetry and digitised text); and post-war Polish poetry and its sociocultural impact.

Watch The Polish Language by Alice Lyons and Orla McHardy