The World Unmade

About Frank Ormsby

Frank Ormsby was born in 1947 in Enniskillen and educated at Queen's University Belfast. He was head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution from 1976 until 2010. As editor of The Honest Ulsterman magazine for twenty years and editor of a number of influential anthologies such as Poets from the North of Ireland (1979) and A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992) he was a central figure in the burgeoning of Ulster poetry since the 1960s. In 1991 he edited The Collected Poems of John Hewitt and in 2007 with Michael Longley Hewitt's Selected Poems. He has also published eight collections of poems most recently Goat's Milk: New and Selected Poems (2015) The Darkness of Snow (2017) and The Rain Barrel (2019). His first two books A Store of Candles (1977) and A Northern Spring (1986) were Poetry Book Society Choices. He was editor with Leontia Flynn of the poetry magazine The Yellow Nib. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2019-2022.