Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha is a poet whose work resonates deeply with themes of identity, embodiment, and the transformative power of art. Born in 1994, she was raised in the Laggan area of East Donegal, close to the border with the North of Ireland. She writes poetry exclusively in Irish, exploring the nature of language, the writing of poetry itself, folklore and mythology from Ireland and abroad, gender, and the identity of the muse. She has a particular interest in visual art, the imagery and figures of Catholicism, as well as the Irish literary tradition.
She has published two poetry collections in Irish, both with Barzaz, Solas Geimhridh agus Dánta Eile (2023) and Mainistir na Feola (2025). St Lucy and the Eye Doctor / San Luíseach agus Lia na Súl is her first Irish-English dual language edition, and draws on both those collections as well as later work. Her translator Ellen Corbett – who comes from just the other side of the border – won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2024 for her translation of Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha’s poem ‘Scrúdú’ (‘Exam’), which is included in this book.
'It would be hard to overstate the joy of Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha’s Solas Geimhridh and Mainistir na Feola for readers of poetry in Irish. The startling range of her subject matter is matched by flexibility of language and form, from the clarity and economy of her poems on menstruation to a sequence on medical excavation of the female body where mischief and vulnerability make perfect bedfellows. Other poems explore linguicide and the possibility of more benevolent intersections between the human and the natural worlds.
'Like Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, she acknowledges and then rejects the limitations of a linguistic imagination moving from English to Irish, integrating the spoken dialects of Donegal and Conamara with the acquired Irish of new speakers of the language to forge an alternative poetic dialect grounded in a thousand years of literature, inflected by her own distinctive tones and accent. To paraphrase her own tribute to her principal avatar, Biddy Jenkinson, the best of her poems are a rare combination of nettle-scald and dew-balm.' – Louis de Paor
Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha reads from St Lucy and the Eye Doctor
Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha introduces and reads a selection of her poems in Irish from her Irish-English dual language edition St Lucy and the Eye Doctor / San Luíseach agus Lia na Súl. She reads the first three poems in Irish and in Ellen Corbett's English translations: ‘Scrudu’ / ’Exam’; ‘Shibboleth Eile’ / ’Another Shibboleth’; and ‘Áit Dhúchais’ / ‘Homeplace’. These are followed by three poems from read in Irish only from Solas Geimhridh: ‘Do Chailín Óg Nach Ann Di’, ‘Dara Comaoineach’ and ‘Mil’. After the readings, Laoighseach talks about how she came to write poetry in Irish, her second language or “moon language", and not in English, her mother tongue or “sun language”, as well as discussing her long collaboration with her translator Ellen Corbett, whose translation ‘Exam’ of Laoighseach’s poem ‘Scrúdú’ won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2024. Neil Astley filmed Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha reading from St Lucy and the Eye Doctor in Galway on 10 April 2025.
With thanks to Literature Ireland for its support for translation costs.
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