Gail McConnell

Gail McConnell is a writer and academic from Belfast. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. A Swedish translation was published by Rámus förlag in 2025. Gail has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology and two poetry pamphlets – Fothermather and Fourteen – and, as editor, The Brimming World: Selected Essays by Ciaran Carson (forthcoming from Gallery in 2025). Gail received the Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and has made two arts features based on her poetry and one on Seamus Heaney for BBC Radio 4. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.