Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. She left school at 14, and was in her late 20s 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 schisms: essays and poems (2018) and Pathogens Love a Patsy: Pandemic & Other Poems (2020) from Salmon; and The Long Weekend (Gill, 2024), poems read on RTÉ 1's Brendan O'Connor Show. Drawing on all of these as well as on later work, her retrospective, Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2026), is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. 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'.
Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2008), The Empty Frame (2008) and The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors (2014). Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989, the Living Poets Society Award in 2021, and several Arts Council bursaries. She has held prison workshops in Ireland and the UK, and is a member of Aosdána. She is an Ireland Reads Ambassador, serving in 2025 and 2026.
Author photo: Andrew Downes
