Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co. Cork in 1945. He is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English. He has published four collections of poetry, The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003). His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008.