Three Poets: Medbh McGuckian, Moyra Donaldson & Ruth Carr

About

Enjoy an inspiring afternoon with three of Northern Ireland's most distinguished poets. Medbh McGuckian, whose awardwinning collections (including New Selected Poems) have earned international acclaim, is joined by acclaimed poet Moyra Donaldson, whose latest collection is The Thirteenth Moon, and Ruth Carr, author of Catching the Missing Beat. Together they will read from their latest collections and reflect on poetry, creativity and the enduring power of language to illuminate memory, place and experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast where she is an Honorary Lecturer at Queen's University. Among the accolades she has received are the Rooney Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen. She is a member of Aosdána. She has over seventeen poetry collections, the most recent of which is New Selected Poems (Gallery Press, 2025).

Moyra Donaldson's latest collection, The Thirteenth Moon, is published by Doire Press, Galway (April 2026). She has published ten previous collections of poetry, and in 2025 an online pamphlet, Abridged 0-112 Don't Speak To Strangers was commissioned. She recently been involved in a collaborations with artist Paddy Lennon resulting in the limited-edition publication of artwork and poems, Blood Horses. Her work has been anthologised and broadcast. In 2019, Moyra received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Ruth Carr from Belfast has assisted editorially in the production of many community publications and readings and in various larger scale anthologies such as The Female Line (1985) and Her Other Language (co-edited with Natasha Cuddington) in 2020. Her poetry collections are There is a House, The Airing Cupboard and Feather and Bone and her latest collection, Catching the Missing Beat centres around a reassessment of her life and the world as she finds it.