as agitator, or an escapist or whatever way you have actively chosen to live your life." Writing Feeney is the author of three poetry collections, a play text, and a novel. The novelist, Mike McCormack, has written that her poems have "a pounding physical presence yet they run away with the mind." A review of her most recent collection, Rise, in PN Review, states that its effect is "to explode the idea of canon with an intense exploration of personal life and its public manifestations". Speaking to The Poetry Review in 2017 Feeney described her approach to writing: "I rarely remember the actual physical act of writing a poem. Some take days, some years". In 2020, before the launch of her debut novel, she told The Observer she had “an anxiety around writing a novel that I didn’t feel around writing poetry, weirdly ... Also I had my first son quite young – I was only 22 – and poetry was quicker." Elsewhere she has said that "sometimes my work comes in madly chaotic spurts, uncomfortable intrusions, poem ideas often come at me, quite brutally out of nowhere, and I’ll write them, and I may never be able to fully explain them, and sometimes they leaving me feeling really uncomfortable and awkward." Elaine was the winner of the 2021 Dalkey Literary Awards 'emerging writer' award. In April 2022 Harvill Secker bought Feeney's second novel, How to Build a Boat in a 'major' two-novel deal from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge and White Bibliography Poetry collections Where's Katie? (2010, Salmon Poetry) The Radio was Gospel (2013, Salmon Poetry) Rise (2017, Salmon Poetry) Novel As You Were (2020, Harvill Secker) Playtext WRoNGHEADED (2016, Liz Roche Company) Short Stories A Little Unsteadily Into Light (2022, New Island Books) References External links https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=427&a=187 https://www.rcwlitagency.com/authors/elaine-feeney/ https://www.ucc.ie/en/english/news/school-of-english-reading-series-featuring-liz-quirke-paul-casey-and-elaine-feeney.html https://connachttribune.ie/elaines-history-lesson-shines-in-new-anthology/ https://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications-section/the-poetry-review/behind-the-poem/your-head-will-be-well-elaine-feeney-and-the-inspiration-of-roethke-in-galway/ http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/105471/nui-galway-to-launch-project-to-archive-personal-histories-of-tuam-mother-and-baby-home Irish poets Irish women poets People from County Galway 21st-century Irish people Living people Year of birth missing (living people)