John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1978, and is the founder of The Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2008 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College. John F. Deane’s poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poems in Italian won the 2002 Premio Internazionale di Poesia Città di Marineo. His fiction has been published by Blackstaff Press in Belfast; his most recent novel Where No Storms Come was published by Blackstaff in 2011. He is the recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature. John F. Deane is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists ‘whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland’. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. In October 2011 Deane was awarded the Serbian prize the Golden Key of Smederevo, as well as the Laudomia Bonanni prize from L’Aquila, Italy.