PAT BORAN was born in Portlaoise in 1963 and has long since lived in Dublin. He has held a number of positions as Writer-in-Residence with public libraries/authorities and third level institutions in the city, as well as with the Western Education and Library Centre in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. He is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Writers Festival, a former presenter of both The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1, and continues to contribute to a number of programmes on the station, including the highly popular Sunday Miscellany.
Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989 he has published six full-length collections of poetry. Those books are: The Unwound Clock (1990), Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996), As the Hand, the Glove (2001), The Next Life (2012) and Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2015) which includes a selection of the author’s photographs. His New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by the late Dennis O'Driscoll, was published in 2005 and reissued by the Dedalus Press in 2007 since when editions have appeared in Italian, Hungarian and Macedonian translation. A new selected poems, ‘o sussurro da corda/ the swoosh of the rope’ was published in Portuguese in 2018. In 2017 Orange Crate Books published A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems, updating and revising his previous selected poems in a pocket-sized format. In March 2019 Dedalus Press published his seventh full-length collection, Then Again.
In addition to poetry he has published a collection of short stories, Strange Bedfellows (1991) and a short fiction title for children, All the Way from China (1999), a finalist for the Bisto Book of the Year Award.
His non-fiction titles include the humorous memoir, The Invisible Prison: Scenes from an Irish Childhood (2009), the writers’ handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (various editions) and A Short History of Dublin (2000).
Pat Boran has edited a large number of poetry publications. He is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review; for EXPO2000 he edited the literature and arts newspaper Portal distributed free to visitors to the Irish stand; with Peter Sirr he co-edited Dublin 15, an audio CD of poems about the city; and he has edited numerous print anthologies of poetry and prose, including Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampler (2006), Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry (2009), The Bee-Loud Glade (2009), Shine On, Irish writers in support of those affected by mental ill-health (2011), with Gerard Smyth If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (2014), the One City, One Book designated title for that year; with Eugene O’Connell, the poetry and prose anthology The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit A Touchstone Poem (2017) and in 2020 The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems, illustrated by Gaetano Tranchino (Dedalus Press).
Pat Boran has conducted writing workshops all over Ireland and has represented Ireland at poetry and literature festivals throughout Europe. He has received a number of Arts Council Bursaries and travel awards and was the 2008 recipient of the US-based Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award. He is a member of Aosdána.