Fred Johnston was born in Belfast in 1951 and educated there and Toronto, Canada. He was a Hennessy Literary Award recipient in 1972. With Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, he founded the Irish Writers’ Co-operative in the mid-Seventies; in 1986, he began CUIRT, an annual festival of literature in Galway. His most recent collection of poems is ‘Rogue States’ (Salmon, 2019.) In 2002 he was writer-in-residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco. Three novels, three collections of short stories and nine collections of poetry have been published. In 2021, He received an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary to conclude work on a series of short stories. Recent work has appeared in The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, Orbis, STAND, The Dalhousie Review, The Temenos Academy Review and others.
