Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew
up in Hull.
He was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and studied as a
postgraduate at the universities of Birmingham, Hull and Leeds, where he
gained a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. He taught at Beacon School,
Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. He was co-founder of the
literary magazine The Printer's Devil and contributes reviews to newspapers
and magazines including the Sunday Times and the Times Literary
Supplement. A regular broadcaster on radio, he presented, in an edition
of BBC Radio 4's 'With Great Pleasure', a selection of his favourite poems and
prose including work by Charles Dickens, A. S. Byatt, Ovid and Shakespeare.
The programme 'The Flavours of Childhood' in the BBC Radio 4 series First
Taste, for which he wrote and read one part and novelist Joanne Harris the
other, won the 2006 Glenfiddich Food and Drink Broadcast Award. His
writing for television includes 'Cousin Coat', a poem-film in Wordworks (Tyne
Tees Television, 1991); 'Cantona', a poem-film in On the Line (BBC2,
1994); Strong Language, a 45-minute poem-film (Channel 4, 1997) and The
Poet Who Left the Page, a profile of Simon Armitage (BBC4, 2002). He has
held fellowships at the universities of Dundee, Leeds, Durham and Newcastle
as well as at universities in Denmark and Japan, and spoken at conferences
in the UK, Greece and Mauritius.
From 1998 to 2006, he taught Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University,
where in 2003 he was made Professor of Poetry. Between 2001 and 2003, he
was Writer in Residence at Live Theatre, Newcastle, a position he held jointly
with the late Julia Darling. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at
Newcastle University and a Vice President of the Poetry Society.
He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1979 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1988,
both awarded by the Society of Authors. His poetry collections include The
Indoor Park (1983), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The
Frighteners (1987); HMS Glasshouse (1991); Ghost Train (1995);
and Downriver (2001). Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 was
published in 2002. Inferno, his verse version of Dante's Inferno, was
published in 2006 and a new poetry collection, The Drowned Book, in 2007.
The latter won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize. Ghost Train, Downriver and The
Drowned Book have all won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection
of the Year), making Sean O'Brien the only poet to have won this prize more
than once. His most recent collections are November (2011), shortlisted for
the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2011 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry
Collection of the Year);The Beautiful Librarians (2015), and Europa (2018),
both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His poems have been included in many
anthologies, such as the 2006 British Council/Granta publication New
Writing 14, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila.
He is the author of a collection of essays about contemporary poetry, The
Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (1998)
and edited the anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after
1945 (1998). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993. His plays include Laughter When We're
Dead, a political tragedy in verse, produced at Live Theatre in 2000 and
broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 2001; Downriver, a jazz music theatre work cowritten
with the composer Keith Morris, premiered in a concert version at
Newcastle Playhouse in 2001; The Black Path, written with Julia Darling,
broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in May 2002; Keepers of the Flame, a verse play
set in the 1930s and 1990s about poetry and Fascism, staged at Live Theatre
in association with the RSC in 2003; and To Encourage the Others, broadcast
on BBC Radio 4 in 2004. The Birds, his new verse version
of Aristophanes' Birds, was commissioned by the National Theatre in
London, first staged at the Lyttelton Theatre in 2002 and revived by
Threeoverden theatre company in a tour of North East England in 2006. He
has dramatised and adapted novels for broadcast as BBC Radio 4 Classic
Serials, including Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (2004) and Graham
Greene's Ministry of Fear (2006).
His short story publications include 'I Cannot Cross Over' in Hyphen: an
anthology of short stories by poets (2003); 'Tabs' in Newcastle Stories (2005);
and five stories in Elipsis 1: Short Stories by Sean O'Brien, Jean Sprackland
and Tim Cooke (2005). His first collection of short stories is The Silence
Room (2008). His first novel, Afterlife, was published in 2009.
Sean O'Brien lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature
