She is the first woman selected for this honour. The judges’ citation commended ‘a ground-breaking and courageous poet who is both local and international, a poet who has helped sustain and remake her language’. Northern Lights, her fourth bilingual collection since Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990), includes new poems translated into English as well as older poems newly translated by some of Ireland’s leading poets.

It displays the author’s constant interweaving of folklore and mythology with interpretations of emotional and psychological states. Embracing both personal and communal suffering, her poems are acts of defiance in a world under threat.