GM - Gail McConnell Archive

GM

Collection

Gail McConnell Archive

1994
2017-2019

1 box Mixed

Authors, English -- 21st century
Poetry

McConnell, GailGail McConnell was born in Belfast, where she now lives. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. Gail read English and History at the University of Edinburgh, then returned to Belfast for an MA in Irish Literature at Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD exploring the relationship of theology and form in the work of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. She was appointed Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast in 2013 and is currently Reader in English. Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, a monograph based on her doctoral research, was published by Palgrave in 2014 and she has also published articles and chapters on Irish and British poetry. She published her first poem in The Manchester Review in 2015 and her poems have since appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbox Manifold, Ambit, Stand, New England Review and The Tangerine. From 2015 until his death in 2019, Ciaran Carson was a mentor and friend to Gail, supporting and encouraging her writing.

Gail is the author of two poetry pamphlets – Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018) and Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019), shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award – and a poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021) which was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize and won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of McConnell’s father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, it attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. It was a book of the year in the TLS and The White Review, and a poetry book of the year in The Telegraph and The Irish Times and a Poetry Book of the Month in the Guardian and The Observer. With Conor Garrett, Gail has made two arts features based on her poetry for BBC Radio 4: Fothermather and The Open Box. She presented a programme on Seamus Heaney and The Troubles for BBC Radio 4 and has appeared on ‘The Essay’ on BBC Radio 3. Gail is the recipient of two Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards.

The collection has been loaned ('storehouse model') to the BACW by Gail McConnell.

This catalogue entry, summarising the collection is just one of several routes through the archive of Gail McConnell (for traditional inventory see section 2 below).

Section One: the following resources are useful additional references to read when encountering the archive or preparing for a visit:

i) The 2002-2003 Mellon Foundation funded project which brought McConnell's archive to UEA employed a 'community led' methodology, discussed in detail in the publication: 'Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive: Final Report' (published by the University of East Anglia and available via our Website www.uea.ac.uk/bacw or via the UEA's Publishing Project)

ii) McConnell wrote creatively inspired by the project and this writing is published separately in the pamphlet: 'Uncollected: Poets' (again available via our Website www.uea.ac.uk/bacw or via the UEA's Publishing Project).

iii) Working as a Poet in Residence on the project, alongside three other poets (Joelle Taylor, Anthony Vahni Capildeo and Gail McConnell) McConnell engaged in a conversation with the then Visiting Poetry Fellow, Will Harris, to discuss their creative process and their archive. An extract of this conversation is transcribed in the aforementioned: 'Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive: Final Report'.

iv) A digital exhibition site: https://contemporarypoetryarchive.omeka.net/ contains videos of events relating to the project, where McConnell reflects on the process of archiving. In addition to McConnell's own writing and recorded reflections on the archive, the site contains exhibits from their archive, curated and interpreted by UEA postgraduate students. Finally, McConnell led a writing workshop ‘Seahorsing’ at Thetford Public Library in Norfolk as part of the project and the public participants' responses are archived and a selection exhibited on the site.

Section Two: what follows is a more traditional inventory of the archive material deposited by McConnell.

Contains one series: GM/1 Works

Use the navigation links, top right, to access those records and a description of the scope and content of the archive.

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