Throw in the Vowels

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 twelve 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, and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010) and Our Killer City: isms, chisms, chasms and chisms: essays and poems (2018) from Salmon. 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 and several Arts Council bursaries, and she is a member of Aosdána.

'A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues. Her poems are a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective, with wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate direct speech' - Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday. 'A quite untameable poet. Higgins roams the provincial towns and countryside of Ireland fomenting rebellion and writing with unstaunchable energy of everything warm and unrespectable in Irish life. Her voice is like nobody else's, simple but not naive, raucous but sympathetic' - Peter Porter, PBS Bulletin. 'Higgins's voices are so distinctive and real that a whole world of semi-rural Irish poverty rises around the reader with the jolting acuity of an excellent documentary...an hilarious, absorbing and thoroughly disturbing experience' - Kate Clanchy, Independent. 'Rita Ann Higgins means a unique line in human warmth; and a unique colour of humour and a unique clarity' - Paul Durcan.