Dave Lordan joins 'The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices'

Delighted Dave Lordan will be writing for The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices.

Dave was born in Derby to Irish Immigrant parents in 1975. Having been evicted from their apartment in Derby, the family moved home to Clonakilty, capital of West Cork in 1977, where his Dad & Mom worked as a miner & a waitress respectively. In 1992 Dave became the first person on his housing estate to finish school & enter university. Having begun writing & performing poetry in his early teens, Dave soon became a central part of the literary scene in UCC, where he became literary editor of the UCC Gazette, & published his first pamphlet, -18-, edited by Philip Coleman in 1994. Dave moved to Dublin in 1999, took an Mphil in Creative Writing in 2001 at Trinity College, helped to kick off the Dublin spoken word scene, & won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2005 for The Boy in the Ring, widely regarded as one of the most influential Irish poetry collections of the 21st century so far. Subsequent collections include Invitation to a Sacrifice & Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains, the title poem of which was covered as a song by Christy Moore. Critic & poet Thomas McCarthy has called Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains ‘a masterpiece’. As well as with Christy, Dave has collaborated in various mediums with numerous other Irish avant-garde & working class artists including Elaine Feeney, Karl Parkinson, Rob Doyle, Mary McEvoy, Jess Traynor, Bernard Clarke, Fionn O hAlmhain, & Eoghan O Ceannabháin. His ‘bizarre’ First Book of Frags was published in 2013 & a story from it, Becoming Polis, was anthologised alongside Swift, Beckett, Joyce & Edna O Brien in 2019s The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press). In recent years Dave has concentrated more on new media writing. His poetry video Because I’m Human is used as an anti-bullying resource by primary schools all over the world, & in 2018 The Dublin Inquirer published his acclaimed podcast memoir The Dead Friends. Latest releases include the soundtracked poetry audio book Snowflakes; the soundtracked fiction The Only Real Irish Poet in Dublin; & the video poem Anti-Fracking Anthem, all of which can be found on Spotify & Bandcamp. His new & selected poems, Invisible Horses, edited by Jess Traynor is due in October 2020.

Besides all this Dave had been a socialist activist since his teens, & has worked for many years as a creativity facilitator with numerous different client groups. He lives in Bray, Co Wicklow with his wife & daughter.

Please consider pledging to make this book happen at https://unbound.com/books/32/ and help us publish 16 new working class writers too!