Paula Meehan was born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. She has received many awards, including the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, The Butler Literary Award for Poetry, the Denis Devlin Memorial Award and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. She has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Dharmakaya, while her latest, Painting Rain, is due in early 2009. A selected volume, entitled Mysteries of the Home, was published in 1996. Her writing for stage includes the plays Mrs Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), and, for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997) and The Wolf of Winter (2003/2004). Her poetry has been set to music by artists as diverse as the avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and the folksinger Christy Moore. She has collaborated throughout her working life with dancers, visual artists and film makers. Paula Meehan is a member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of writers and artists.

***

Best known as one of the leading Irish poets of her generation, Paula Meehan is also an accomplished and much-admired playwright, and her stage work has been performed by, among others, Team Theatre Company, Rough Magic, Calypso Theatre Company and The National Theatre Company at the Peacock.

As well as her work for stage, in recent years she has also written for radio, a medium which provides particular scope for the oral and sonic qualities so often admired in her writing. Music for Dogs presents, for the first time in print, a selection of that work for radio from a poet of “perfect pitch” (Midwest Book Review). Janey Mack is Going to Die, The Lover and Threehander were all written for and first performed on RTÉ Radio 1.