Elaine Feeney

Biography

Elaine Feeney works across poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction, and is recognised as one of Ireland's most distinctive contemporary literary voices. She won Irish Writer of the year in 2025 at The An Post Irish Book Awards, and has been nominated for the Booker Prize. 

She is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, including The Radio Was Gospel, Rise, (Salmon Poetry) and All the Good Things You Deserve (Harvill Secker/Vintage, 2024). Her poetry has been widely praised for its lyrical intensity, social consciousness and exploration of place, memory and identity.

Her debut novel, As You Were (2020), won the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer Award, the Kate O'Brien Award, and the Society of Authors McKitterick Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. The novel appeared on numerous Best Books of 2020 lists, and Feeney was selected by The Observer and The Guardian as one of the year's most notable debut novelists.

Her short fiction has appeared in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson, and her work has been widely published in journals and publications including The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, Lit Hub, The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, BBC Radio, RTÉ and The Guardian.

Her second novel, How to Build a Boat (2023), was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail and The Irish Times. It also received the Tatler Women's Award for Literature.

Feeney is a graduate of University College Galway, University College Cork and the University of Limerick. Her creative work is informed by an ongoing inquiry into institutions, restorative justice, gender, trauma, illness, education, nationhood and working-class experience. She is co-founder of the Tuam Oral History Project at the University of Galway, where she leads Educational and Creative Output. The project records and archives first-person testimonies from those directly affected by the Tuam Mother and Baby Institution.

Before becoming a full-time academic and writer, Feeney taught at post-primary level in Tuam for many years and received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland in 2020.

Her third novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (Harvill Secker/Vintage), was published in May 2025. 

She is currently working with Decadent Theatre Company on a stage adaptation of As You Were, bringing her award-winning debut novel to theatres in 2027.