We are delighted to share Rita Ann Higgins as our Special Commendation for Spring 2026.
Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. She left school at fourteen, and was in her late twenties when she started writing poetry.
She has since published many books of poetry and prose, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005), Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016) from Bloodaxe; Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010), Our Killer City: isms, chisms, chasms and chisms: essays and poems (2018) and Pathogens Love a Patsy: Pandemic & Other Poems (2020) from Salmon; and The Long Weekend (Gill, 2024). Her 2026 Bloodaxe retrospective, Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems, draws on all these collections as well as later work.
Her appearances on the Brendan O’Connor Show during and since the pandemic earned her even wider popularity in Ireland – reading her poems to audiences of over 400,000 on the weekend shows – with O’Connor calling her “the people’s poet”. She is a member of Aosdána.
Image credit: Andrew Downes