Leontia Flynn

• Name — Leontia Flynn • Born — 1974 • Birthplace — Downpatrick • Occupation — Professor; poet • Alma Mater — Queen's University Belfast • Thesis Title — Reading Medbh McGuckian. • Thesis Year — 2004 • Discipline — Literature • Sub Discipline — Poetry • Workplaces — Queen's University Belfast Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.

Leontia Flynn was born in Downpatrick, Co Down and grew up between Dundrum and Newcastle, Co Down. She attended Assumption Grammar School, Ballynahinch and afterwards began an English degree at Trinity College Dublin before dropping out. She completed a degree and later a PhD in English at Queen's University Belfast, and an MSc in writing and cultural politics at Edinburgh University. She is a professor at Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University where she has worked since 2005.

• Taking Liberties Jonathan Cape 2023; • The Radio Jonathan Cape 2017; • Profit and Loss Jonathan Cape 2011; • Drives Jonathan Cape 2008; • These Days Jonathan Cape 2004;

• Nina Simone is Singing Mariscat, 2021 • Slim New Book Lifeboat Press, 2020

Flynn has written about family and psychological inheritance, as well as about her father's Alzheimer's disease. Her poems also sometimes address technology. She has described the sonnets in Drives as ‘wikipedia poems’.

Flynn's work has been favourably reviewed by writers and critics. Tom Paulin wrote "smart as a whip, lyrical, always on point, Leontia Flynn's poems are the real, right thing." In The Irish Times, Philip Coleman posited that Flynn's place as one of the strongest and most skilful poetic voices of her generation. In The Observer, where The Radio was Book of the Month, Kate Kellaway wrote: "Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance… I kept returning to poems for the sheer pleasure of them – no slog involved."

• Reading Medbh McGuckian Irish Academic Press, 2012