Liz McSkeane was born in Glasgow and has lived in Dublin since 1981
where she has worked as a teacher, broadcaster and ed ucation consultant with a special interest in literacy and educational disadvantage. In 1988 she joined Dublin Writers’ Workshop which she co-facilitated for two years with the writer John Minihane; in 1990 they founded the DWW journal, Acorn, named for the Oak Tavern in Dame Street, the original venue where the Workshop used to meet.Since then, Liz has written numerous poems, short stories and radio scripts, many of which have been published in newspapers, magazines and literary journals including The Irish Times , Poetry Ireland Review , The Shop, The Stinging Fly and others. Her work has been broadcast on RTE Radio , on several programmes including The Arts Show and The Enchanted Road. She also scripted and presented three literary documentaries for RTE Radio 1 on the lives and work of Beckett, Robert Burns and George Bernard Shaw . In 1996, Lapwing Press published her first short poetry collection, a chapbook called In Flight. Her poetry has also been anthologised in The White Page (Salmon Poetry, 1999) and Slow Time: 100 Poems to Take You There (Mercier, 2000 ).In 1999 Liz won the Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer of the Year Award and the Emerging Poetry Award. Her first full collection, Snow at the Opera House, was published in 2002 by New Island Press. Since then, alongside working on her poems and short stories, Liz has completed her PhD in Education. Most of her publications in the last few years have been in that field, on behalf of various Irish and European organisations including, in the last two years, the European Commission. She is currently working on her next collection of poems, provisionally entitled Versailles; and also on her first novel. |