Thomas Kinsella (4 May 192822 December 2021) was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and, around the same time, translated early Irish poetry into English. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States to teach English at universities including Temple University. Kinsella continued to publish steadily until the 2010s. Early life and work Thomas Kinsella was born on 4 May 1928 in Inchicore to Agnes (Casserly) and John Kinsella. He spent most of his childhood in the Kilmainham/Inchicore area of Dublin. He was educated at the Model School, Inchicore, where classes were taught in the Irish language, and at the O'Connell Schools in North Richmond Street, Dublin. His father and grandfather both worked in Guinness's brewery. He entered University College Dublin in 1946, initially to study science. After a few terms in college, he took a post in the Irish civil service in the department of finance and continued his university studies at night, having switched to humanities and arts. Many of Kinsella's early poems were published in the University College Dublin magazine National Student from 1951 to 1953. His first pamphlet, The Starlit Eye (1952), was published by Liam Miller's Dolmen Press, as was Poems (1956), his first book-length publication. These were followed by Another September (1958–1962), Moralities (1960), Downstream (1962), Wormwood (1966), and the long poem Nightwalker (1967). Translations and editing At Miller's suggestion, Kinsella turned his attention to the translation of early Irish texts. He produced versions of Longes Mac Usnig and The Breastplate of St Patrick in 1954 and of Thirty-Three Triads in 1955. His most significant work in this area was collected in two volumes. The first of these was The Táin (Dolmen, 1969; Oxford University Press, 1970), a version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge illustrated by Louis le Brocquy. With Seán Ó Tuama, Kinsella co-edited An Duanaire: 1600–1900, Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), an anthology of Irish poems that critic Siobhán Holland describes as a "politicized deployment of the anthology genre". An Duanaire won a "special award" of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1982. He also edited Austin Clarke's Selected Poems and Collected Poems (both 1974) for Dolmen and The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986). According to critic Dillon Johnston, Kinsella's translations of Táin and An Duanaire