Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in 1942 in Cork, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and currently Ireland Professor of Poetry (2016-19).
She has published and edited academic articles and books on the literature of the English Renaissance, on translation, and on Irish writing in both Irish and English. With her husband Macdara Woods, the late Leland Bardwell and the late Pearse Hutchinson, she is, since 1975, a founder and co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. She has published eight collections of poetry over 45 years, and her Selected Poems appeared in 2008, published by Gallery Press in Ireland, Wake Forest University Press in America and Faber in Britain. The Sun-Fish, her seventh collection, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.