Biography

Declan Kiberd was born in Dublin in 1951 and educated at TCD and Oxford University. He has lectured on Irish culture in more than 20 countries and is currently Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD. His many publications include Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature, and Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation, which won The Irish Times Literature Prize for Non-Fiction in 1997. In 1993 he published Idir Dha Chultur, a study of the influence of English language culture on writing in Irish. He is a former director of the Yeats International Summer School. The above introduction to Tomas O Criomhthain is taken from his new book Irish Classics (Granta, £25), published this week.