Maurice Riordan

Maurice Riordan (born 1953) is an Irish poet, translator, and editor.

Born in Lisgoold, County Cork, his poetry collections include: A Word from the Loki (1995), a largely London-based collection which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Floods (2000) which took a more millennial tone, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award;[1] The Holy Land (2007) which contains a sequence of Idylls or prose poems and returns to Riordan's Irish roots more directly than his earlier work. It received the Michael Hartnett Award.[2]

His anthologies include A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2000), a collaboration with Jon Turney, an anthology of ecological poems Wild Reckoning (2004) edited with John Burnside, and Dark Matter (2008) edited with astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. He has also edited a selection of poems by Hart Crane (2008) in Faber's 'Poet to Poet' series.

He has translated the work of Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud. His collection for children The Moon Has Written You a Poem is adapted from the Portuguese of José Jorge Letria.[3]

In 2004 he was selected as one of the Poetry Society's 'Next Generation' poets.[4] He was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 2005 to 2009 [5] and Editor of The Poetry Review from 2013 to 2017.[6]

Riordan was educated in St. Colman's College, Fermoy, University College Cork and McMaster University, Ontario, Canada.

He has taught at Goldsmiths College and at Imperial College and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. He lives in London.