Peter Sirr lives in Dublin where he works as a freelance writer and translator. He teaches a course in literary translation for the Translation Centre in Trinity College, Dublin. Intimate City: Dublin Essays was published in 2021.These essays reflect a long-standing attachment to and obsession with the Dublins of the past and present: the contemporary city but also the ancient walled city or the city mapped in 1756 by a French Huguenot or the one enumerated in 1803. Present and past, personal and public, memory and invention intersect in a book enlivened by the sense of the city as a layered place where people have lived and died for more than a thousand years.The essays wander through the physical space of the author’s inner city neighbourhood and the speculations of developers, but also the ‘mind city’ of writers, poets, artists and ghosts. Often at stake too is the contested city of competing narratives and visions where battles are fought over what and who is celebrated or commemorated. Tracing old routes, tracking new ones, adventuring in streets, houses and rooms, these essays collectively amount to ‘a chain of linked desires’: to walk the city, ‘ to drink in details . . . listening for the steps of those who’ve been here before . . . to greet time, stop it on the pavement before it scurries off’.

His most recent collection of poems is The Gravity Wave. Sway, versions of poems from the troubadour tradition, was published by Gallery Press in 2016.  The Rooms was published by Gallery in 2014 and shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Poetry Prize.  The Thing Is, published by Gallery Press in 2009, was awarded the Michael Hartnett Prize in 2011. The Gallery Press has also published Marginal Zones (1984), Talk, Talk (1987), Ways of Falling (1991), The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange (1995), Bring Everything (2000), Selected Poems and Nonetheless (both 2004). A novel for children, Black Wreath, was published by O’Brien Press in 2014. RTE has broadcast several of his radio dramas. He is a member of Aosdána and is married to the poet Enda Wyley. 

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