Leanne O'Sullivan comes from the Beara Peninsula in West Cork and was educated at University College Cork. Although she is still in her twenties, she has already won most of Ireland's main poetry competitions and had poems published in many of the magazines - when no one knew her age. She has won first prize in the Seacat poetry competition, the RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam and the Davoren Hanna Award for Young Emerging Irish Poet. Her first collection Waiting for my Clothes, published by Bloodaxe 2004, traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorder and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness. She has been writing poetry since she was 12, and began these poems not thinking they would ever form part of a book, but 'writing down the reasons I should live for' and then 'becoming addicted to looking at things to find the beauty in them'.
Her work has been included in various anthologies, including Best Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Publishing), Selina Guinness's The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) and Billy Collins's Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003). Residencies and festival readings have taken her to France, India and China, amongst other locations and she was the recipient of the 2009 Ireland Chair of Poetry bursary. In 2010 she received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, which is administered by the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing based at Trinity School of English. Her latest collection is Cailleach: The Hag of Beara published by Bloodaxe (2009).
'What is remarkable about Leanne O'Sullivan is not that she is so young but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teen-age Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true. For that alone, she deserves our full attention' - Billy Collins
