AFRIC MCGLINCHEY

About Afric

 

 

Afric is an Irish-born poet, reviewer, freelance book editor and mentor for the Munster Literature Centre and for Words Ireland. She lives in West Cork, her home since 1999. Before that, she was living in Zimbabwe, where she spent her formative years and early adulthood.

​

Her début The lucky star of hidden things, is predominantly based around her African upbringing. Her second collection, Ghost of the Fisher Cat is set loosely in Paris, where she also lived for a time. Both have been widely reviewed, and reviews and more details are available on the Salmon Poetry site.

​

Both of her collections have been translated into Italian and published in Italy by Casa Editrice L'Arcolaio.

​

Here's an Italian review.

​

A surrealist chapbook, Invisible Insane, was published by SurVision in 2019 and is available here.

​

​

Publications

​

Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry International and the Oxford Climate Change Anthology. Poems have been featured in Poethead, the Rochford Street Review, and Numero Cinq and broadcast on RTÉ’s Poetry Programme and Arena. Her work has been translated into Italian, Irish, Spanish, Polish and Romanian. Both of Afric's collections were translated into Italian and published by Casa Editric L’Arcolaio.  

 

Some of her reviews can be viewed online, here: The Dublin Review of Books and Sabotage Reviews.

​

​

Awards

 

Afric was awarded the Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry for 2010, the Northern Liberties Poetry Prize for 2012 (USA), and the Poets Meet Politics Prize in 2015.  She was nominated for a Pushcart and for a Best of the Net award, and has been placed or highly commended in numerous other competitions.  Afric was named in Poetry Ireland Review  (Issue 118) as one of Ireland’s Rising Poets.

 

In 2013, she  performed at Poetry Africa in Durban, and the following year, was one of the seven writers chosen to represent Ireland on the Italo-Irish Literary Exchange, thanks to support from the Irish Writers Centre. Poetry Ireland gave her the opportunity to read at the Iowa Festival in 2016. She has received funding from the Cork County Council, Culture Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland, from whom she was awarded a Literature Bursary in 2017 to complete a hybrid, auto-fictional memoir, Tied to the Wind. The book was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. See below for a link.

​

In 2022, Afric received an Arts Council Literature Bursary to work on a second memoir.

​

​