Leeanne Quinn was born in Drogheda in 1978. She studied at University College Dublin, University College Cork, and holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Her poems have been anthologised in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (forthcoming), Airborne: Poetry from Ireland (2012) and The Bee-Loud Glade: A Living Anthology of Irish Poetry (2011). Her work has been published in a variety of magazines and journals including The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, and The SHOp and broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. Her debut collection, Before You, was published in 2012, a poem from which was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. She lives in Dublin and is currently working towards her second collection.
‘There’s a graceful and assured rigour to the lyrics of Leeanne Quinn’s Before You. She writes tenderly of the ‘white sands of our imagination’. Like Elizabeth Bishop, Quinn reminds us that ‘distance ... is the hearts limitation’. She is a poet of intimacy and quiet recollection, a poet who writes about loss with heartbreaking compassion: ‘These streets ... tell you you must earn your healing.’ Before You is a book of sparing and hard-earned poems; it is a wonderful achievement.’
—Paul Perry
‘These are intimate and finely-tuned lyrics, observant of subjective states and patterns of shared experience… It marks a debut of considerable depth and maturity.’
—Lucy Collins, The Stinging Fly
