Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland. She has worked as a teacher in her native Belfast at St Patrick's College, Knock and as an editor and is a former Writer in Residence at Queen's University. She spent part of a term appointed as visiting poet and instructor in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley (1991). Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, 'All The Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems' and 'Portrait of Joanna', in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published 'Trio Poetry 2' with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on 'Two Women, Two Shores'. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, 'The Flower Master' (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1983).