Belfast Invites: Miriam Gamble & Padraig Reagan

Belfast Invites: a mini-series in which Belfast-based writers are asked who they’d like to be in conversation with.

For this instalment we are delighted to welcome Miriam Gamble and Padraig Reagan to discuss their poetic inspirations, the impact of Belfast on their writing and their careers. 

Miriam Gamble has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe Books: The Squirrels Are Dead (2010), Pirate Music (2014) and What Planet (2019). What Planet won the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize; Miriam has also received the Somerset Maugham Award (for The Squirrels Are Dead), an Eric Gregory Award, the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award. Originally from Belfast, she’s lived in Scotland since 2010 and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Little Acts of Vigilance, published by The Lifeboat, is her first essay collection. 

Padraig Regan's debut collection Some Integrity was published by Carcanet in 2022 and was awarded the Clarissa Luard Award and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They are the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They are currently Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge.