at the Sorbonne. Literary career According to Louis De Paor, "Máire Mhac an tSaoi spent two years studying in post-war Paris (1945–47) before joining the Irish diplomatic service, and was working at the Irish embassy in Madrid, during Franco's regime, when she committed herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of Federico Garcia Lorca. The tension between religious beliefs, contemporary social mores, and the more transgressive elements of female desire is central to the best of her work from the 1940s and early 1950s. Both her deference to traditional patterns of language and verse and her refusal of traditional morality might be read as a reaction to the social, moral, and cultural upheaval of a world at war." She remained a prolific poet and was credited, along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with reintroducing literary modernism into Irish literature in the Irish-language, where it had been dormant since the 1916 execution of Patrick Pearse, in the years and decades following World War II. According to De Paor, "Máire Mhac an Tsaoi's poetry draws on the vernacular spoken by the native Irish speakers of the Munster Gaeltacht of West Kerry during the first half of the twentieth century. Formally, she draws on the song metres of the oral tradition and on older models from the earlier literary tradition, including the syllabic metres of the early modern period. The combination of spoken dialect enhanced by references and usages drawn from the older literature, and regular metrical forms contribute to a poetic voice that seems to resonate with the accumulated authority of an unbroken tradition. In the later work, she explores looser verse forms but continues to draw on the remembered dialect of Dún Chaoin and on a scholarly knowledge of the older literature." She was elected to Aosdána in 1996, but resigned in 1997 after Francis Stuart was elevated to the position of Saoi. Mhac an tSaoi had voted against Stuart because of his role as an Abwehr spy and in radio propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany aimed at neutral Ireland during World War II. Mhac an tSaoi had a lifelong passion for the Irish language, and was one of the leading authorities on Munster Irish. In 2001, Mhac an tSaoi published an award-winning novel A Bhean Óg Ón... about the relationship between the 17th-century County Kerry poet and Irish clan chief, and folk