Cathy Galvin
Writer
POETRY
Ethnology (Bloodaxe Books) is my first full collection of poetry, published in the UK and Ireland by Bloodaxe Books in February 2026. It follows the sequence Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva (Guillemot Press), the short collection Rough Translation (Melos Press) and a crown of sonnets, Black & Blue (Melos Press.
Further work has appeared in a variety of journals including the Morning Star, Agenda, New Walk, 14, Vanguard, London Magazine and Poetry London. I'm honoured to have been the recipient of an Arts Council England DYCP award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Heinrich Böll Residency, Achill Island.
Ethnology
Forthcoming February '26 Bloodaxe Books
The journey to ruins of Cathy Galvin’s inherited island cottage is made through the veins, organically. These intensely lyrical poems are a paean to south Connemara and a vanishing way of life, where land, body and spirit merge in incantations of salt and turf, deep and true as “an umbilical cord of love
Pascale Petit, Winner of the Ondaatje Prize
OTHER BOOKS
Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva
Published 11 Nov 2019
Guillemot Press
The poem, itself, is a technical tour-de-force combining the Latin mass with the argot of two-tone, the ‘words’ of Lady Godiva, and a marvellous lyricism all of Galvin’s own”.
Ian Pople
Ring Road is an archaeology and rediscovering of what it means to be a citizen of this fabled city.
David Morley
Rough Translation: poems by Cathy Galvin
Published 14 Sep 2016
The Melos Press
"Rough Translation is a powerful and intimate meditation on the position of women in Irish society, with a range of riches that reward re-reading."
Ian Pople, The Manchester Review
"Cathy Galvin's Rough Translation translates ordinary life into elemental cycles."
Alison Brackenbury, PN Review
"Cathy Galvin's writes about what matters, the ground is real, and so the poems ring true."
David Constantine: Poet, Author of In Another Country
Rough Translation stakes a claim on a vanished past, and among the nostalgia and loss there is a great deal of charm.
From Leanbh, a poem where the Irish word for baby echoes the English word for Love, to Naming, an evocation of the sea burials of unnamed dead babies, we see a poet ably navigating the fault lines between tradition and modernity.
Róisín Tierney, poet. Winner of the 2012 Michael Marks Award.
Black and Blue: A sequence of sonnets
Published 1 Nov 2014
The Melos Press
"The book is wonderful. So beautiful and moving...family, grief, childhood, angels, birds, the language and structures of Catholicism. Black and Blue is a gorgeous sacramental thing... "
David Almond, author of Skellig
" Galvin moves here into something transcendent and emotionally powerful.
She reveals herself to have a canny understanding of how to maximise the power of endings to keep readers engaged with her work"
Jonathan Edwards, Winner of the Costa Prize for Poetry. Commenting on Black and Blue in New Welsh Review.
"A crown of sonnets seems at first an intractable and even intimidating prospect. When a writer confidently inhabits its space, its spaces within spaces, the crown becomes an arena of grace.
Cathy Galvin's Black and Blue is such a performance. Her sequence moves brilliantly through and over those spaces with drama, immediacy and power."
David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2016
PUBLICATIONS
SHORT STORIES
In collections
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READINGS
Ted Hughes Festival, Mexborough; Poetry Book Fair, London; Heinrich Boll Memorial Festival, Ireland; The Music Room, Waterstones Piccadilly, The Society Club, Tara Arts Theatre (all London); University of Warwick; Nine Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham; Terre Verte Gallery, Falmouth Book Shop, Charles Causley Poetry Festival; and Lost in Words bookshop, (all Cornwall). Plus: the Winchester Poetry Festival; Milton Keynes Literary Festival.