Biography
Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry City. His poems have been published widely, (The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, Banshee) anthologised (Queering the Green: Post-2000 Irish Poetry; Romance Options: Love Poems for Today) and translated into French.
He was a recipient of the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Prize, and was selected by Kei Miller for the International Literature Showcase in 2021 as one of ten ‘unmissable’ emerging writers.
He has published two pamphlets of poems, Safe Home (Green Bottle Press, 2020) and Keeper (Fourteen Publishing, 2022) as well as a collaborative art book Waking Light with Kerri ní Dochartaigh. His full-length collections of poetry are published by The Gallery Press. His first, Devotion, was highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2024, and listed as a Book of the Year by RTÉ and The Irish Times. His second collection, Lives of the Saints, was published in May 2026.
He is a poetry critic for The Irish Times and regularly teaches creative writing at all levels. He lives and works in Belfast as a secondary school teacher.
Reviews
‘Mícheál McCann’s engaging and elegant pamphlet of poems moves through what is, in some way, every queer person’s story, the motion from exile toward love. […] There’s a freshness to McCann’s gaze as he studies Irish landscapes and men’s hearts. And in his voice, too, a wonderfully flexible accomplishment: both straight-forward and artfully oblique, conversational and wrought’
— Mark Doty
‘Mícheál McCann’s poems startle, delightfully, with dextrous shifts of tone, register, reference point […] This warm-hearted and honestly complex work finds homes in unexpected places and draws forth the unexpected from home’
— Miriam Gamble
“Queerness is just one part of McCann’s identity and it is folded into an intellect, a curiosity, a slight mischievousness that looks out to the world and notices its oddities and its disruptions.”
– Kei Miller, International Literature Showcase Selector
Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book – courtly, even. […] It’s also imbued with a thwarted belief in words themselves, as shoddy but irresistible tools: “Were it that they/could save us, and were no momentary crossing to safety”.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
There is, throughout [Lives of the Saints], and fittingly considering the title, an overarching glow of love, a determination to find beauty, “despite things going unbeautifully / beyond the lip / of this creamy windowsill”.
— Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times
