Part of the so-called Coleraine Cluster of writers, Dawe explored a less-voiced north Belfast lower middle-class upbringing
Gerald Dawe, who has died aged 72, was a poet of Northern Ireland’s liberal Protestant tradition, even while plying his trade from Galway and Dublin. He was equally devoted to emerging writers north and south, as a teacher, anthologist and publisher, and for many years was fellow and professor of English at Trinity College Dublin.
Besides 14 volumes of poetry, he published 10 collections of essays, and anthologies including The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets .
Their street, wedged between Cave Hill and the Lough, was a “world of small gardens, minute backyards”, but a variegated one, with Jewish refugee families, an Austrian breeder of pedigree poodles and a Catholic house where Dawe became “almost a foster son”, he recalls in his memoir A City Imagined: Belfast Soulscapes .
After a stint as an assistant librarian at Belfast Central Library, Dawe received a research grant and went to study at University College, Galway, where he wrote an MA thesis on the Victorian Irish writer William Carleton. At Trinity, Dawe was appointed a fellow and professor of English, establishing Ireland’s first creative writing master’s programme, and in 1997 became the founding director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing. Retiring in 2017, he remained supportive of new talent and engaged with other writers during a lengthy period of suffering from cancer. He was awarded the 2024 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy poetry award by the University of St Thomas, Minnesota.
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