---
title: "About"
url: "https://ruthocallaghan.com/about"
updated: 2026-10-12
description: "Ruth O'Callaghan's life and work: her collections, fellowships, residencies, readings and theatre writing."
---

# About

![Ruth O'Callaghan](https://alftyk7urukjxizc.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/ruth-ocallaghan/ruth_ocallaghan_poet1-j6wArez1goHtnsr93kgWQ804RPYC5g.jpg)

| Lives | London |
| --- | --- |
| Collections | 17, the latest _Threads_ (2026) |
| Translated into | Italian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian, Hungarian and Romanian |
| Fellowship | Hawthornden, 2008 |
| Hosts | Camden and Lumen Poetry, since 2008 |

# About Ruth O'Callaghan

Ruth O'Callaghan was born in London and lives there. She taught children with special educational needs for many years before she gave her time to poetry.

She has published seventeen collections with Shoestring Press, Salmon Poetry, Two Rivers Press and others, from _Where Acid Has Etched_ (2007) to _Threads_ (2026). Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Stand and The London Magazine, and in more than twenty anthologies.

## Fellowships, residencies and awards

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| 2006 | Prizewinner, The Silver Wyvern, Poetry on the Lake International Festival |
| 2008 | Hawthornden Fellowship |
| 2009 | Arts Council award to work with women poets in Mongolia, which led to the anthology _Echoes from the Steppe_ |
| 2010 | Gold Medal for Poetry, XXX World Congress of Poets, Taiwan |
| 2010 | Heinrich Böll residency, Achill Island, Ireland |
| 2014 | Heinrich Böll residency, a second time |
| 2017 | Writer in residence, Siena Art Institute |

## Readings

Ruth has read in Europe, Asia and the United States, with a tour of Wisconsin and Illinois in 2011 and readings in New York and Boston in 2012. One American audience was on a buffalo farm, where, in her words, "the buffalo outnumbered the poets". She launched _Wringing Blood_ at the Gibraltar International Literary Festival in 2018, and has read and led workshops at the Oxford Literary Festival.

## Other work

Ruth judges poetry competitions, among them the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society's Open Competition in 2019, and has judged for the Koestler Trust, whose awards are for writing and art by people in prison. She is the poet for Strandlines, a community writing project at King's College London.

She also writes for the theatre. She was a finalist in an international playwriting competition set up by the producer Sonia Friedman, and her work has been staged at the Soho Theatre, the Old Red Lion and the White Bear.