Martina Evans

Martina Evans is an Irish poet, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children.

She is the author of eleven books of prose and poetry. Her first novel, Midnight Feast, won a Betty Trask Award in 1995 and her third novel, No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors (Bloomsbury, 2000), won an Arts Council England Award in 1999. Martina’s fourth poetry collection, Facing the Public was published by Anvil Press in September 2009 and has won bursary awards from both the Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Eiraíon) and Arts Council England. Facing the Public was a TLS Book of the Year in 2009 and won the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Petrol, a prose poem won a Grants for the Arts Award in 2010 and was published by Anvil Press in 2012.  A revised edition of Midnight Feast and Through The Glass Mountain, a new prose poem, were published by Bloom Books in June 2013. Burnfort, Las Vegas ( Anvil Press 2014) was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2015. Mountainy Men, a new narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015 and Watch, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016. The Windows of Graceland, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016.

Martina has been Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London from 2003-2007 and again in 2011-2012. She has run workshops in Ireland, UK, Switzerland and the U.S.. and seminars at London Metropolitan University, The National Film & Television School and Goldsmiths. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and University of East London and a Creative Writing tutor at the City Literary Institute, Covent Garden, London for many years.Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and reviews for the Irish Times. She lives in London with her daughter, Liadain Evans.