Annette Skade is from Manchester, and moved to the Beara peninsula in West Cork in 1989.
Annette has always read poetry, and began writing it about fifteen years ago when a friend persuaded her to go to a poetry workshop.
She has a degree in Ancient Greek and Philosophy from Liverpool University and has an MA in Poetry Studies from Dublin City University, where she read everything from Basil Bunting to the York Mystery Plays, Elizabeth Bishop to Maurice Scully. She has recently spent a fascinating four years researching the work of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, at Dublin City University, and has successfully defended her thesis. She will be formally conferred with a Doctorate in March 2021.
Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals in Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia. She has collaborated with other writers and musicians to produce original pieces of work. Her sound collaboration with Cormac MacAnFhalla “Compartments” was installed in Ireland’s only cable car as part of the Beara Arts Festival 2016, and she has worked with Maria Isakova -Bennett and poets from around the coast of Britain and Ireland to produce a “Coast to Coast to Coast” Litany, in conjunction with Maria’s artworks for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2018. She continued the collaboration by having a poem included in the “Coast to Coast to Coast Poetry in Aldeburgh” anthology in 2019, and hugely enjoyed reading at the Festival in 2019 at the launch of the anthology. .
In 2017 she was Florence Writers and Irish Writers Centre Writer in Residence at St Marks Cultural Centre, Florence.
She has just completed a collection of eco-poetry about the sea and the coastal community where she lives in the West of Ireland. Many of the poems from the collection have been published in poetry journals and magazines, and two have won awards.
Annette has a working class background and is very proud to have three poems included in the recent Children of the Nation. Anthology of Working People’s Poetry from Contemporary Ireland. November 2019
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