John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929 and raised in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He studied in Dublin, Yale, Iowa and Berkeley, and in the late 1960s taught in Berkeley and in Paris, from 1974 to 1988 at University College Cork, and from 1989 at SUNY Albany in the USA. He has published two works of fiction, Death of a Chieftain (1964) and The Lost Notebook (1988), as well as some ten collections of poetry, from Forms of Exile (1958) to Mount Eagle (1988) and New Selected Poems (1989). In 1974 he edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse and his anthology Bitter Harvest appeared in America in 1989.