Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. Her first book These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004) won the Forward prize for best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and saw her named one of twenty "˜Next Generation' poets by the Poetry Book Society. Her second collection Drives (Jonathan Cape) was published in 2008, when she won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artists Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her third collection, Profit and Loss was Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011, and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She was awarded the Lawrence O'Shaunnessey Prize for Irish Literature in 2013 and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award for 2014. She is a lecturer in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Queen's University Belfast.