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Louis de Paor is one of Ireland’s leading Irish-language poets.

This new selection is drawn from two other books, Cúpla Siamach an Ama / The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar / Crooked Love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence Lá dá raibh/One day, which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where living and dead, real and unreal, collide. Adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn and broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gael-tachta in 2021, this can be heard while reading in either language by scanning QR codes printed in the book.

Louis de Paor was born in Cork in 1961 and and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, editing the influential Irish-language journal Innti for a time. He spent time as a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork and Thomond College, Limerick, before combining teaching with radio work in Australia from 1987 to 1996. He was appointed Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway in 2000. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, and his dual language anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession in 2016. He lives in Oughterard, Co. Galway.