Brian Kirk : part one

Brian Kirk is an award-winning poet and short story writer from Dublin. His children’s novel The Rising Son was published in December 2015. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2013 and highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2014 and 2015. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday”, taken from that collection, won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.

How did you first engage with poetry?

At school, first of all. I was lucky to have a good English teacher at Secondary School, so I enjoyed most of the poetry I came across. Then I suppose I discovered the Beats, and later I went looking for other modern poets. It’s an unending journey of reading and discovering new and old poets. When I was 19, I began to write poems and did so for a while before studying English Literature in London when I was in my twenties. I stopped writing for a while and then went back to it some years later and here I am still learning fifteen years later.