Michael Hartnett was born on September 18th, 1941 in a hospital in the small town of Croom, Co. Limerick. Although born to Denis and Bridie Harnett, an error on his birth certificate made him a Hartnett, which he never changed as it is closer to the Gaelic O'hAirtneide. He grew up in the town of Newcastle West, Co. Limerick, although he spent some of his younger years fostered out to his Grandmother, Bridget Halpin in the countryside outside of NCW. There he learned by listening, to speak and understand the Gaelic language. He had several siblings: a sister, Mary and brothers Billy, Dinny, Gerard and John as well as two other siblings who died at an early age. He was educated in the local primary school, and then in St. Ita's secondary school for boys where he argued with the English teacher as much as he could! He left Ireland the day after he finished his Leaving Cert to work as a tea boy on a building site in London. He was writing at that time and getting published in Newspapers and an article appeared about him entitled "The Teaboy of the Western World". Poet Paul Durcan spotted one of his poems in a newspaper and showed it to the Dublin literati, including Professor John Jordan, who was a poet and professor of English in UCD. He sponsored Michael to go to U.C.D. for a year and his Aunt Madge (a children's Nanny) paid his keep. During this time in Dublin Michael co-authored the literary magazine "ARENA" with James Liddy. He also worked on a version of the 'Tao Te Ching' while curator of Joyce's tower at Sandycove during this period. After this period he returned to London and met my mother, Rosemary Grantley on 16th May 1965, introduced by mutual friends and they were married on 4th April 1966. Anatomy of a Cliché, a book of love poetry dedicated to and about my mother was published in 1968 to critical acclaim. It was the beginning of his serious writing career. Two weeks after my sister, Lara, was born in 1968, they moved back to Ireland and settled in Marino, Dublin. My Dad worked as a night telephonist at the Dublin telephone exchange on Exchequer Street. I came along in 1971 and in 1974 my father decided that he needed to get back to his roots in the country to more seriously pursue his writing and more specifically his communing with the Irish language. Incidentally, he first won both the Irish American Literature Award and the Arts Council Award that same year. He became a lecturer in creative writing at Thomond College in Limerick for a while. Then in 1975, he made the great and bold political statement that he was going to no longer write in English" to court the language of his people" with the publication of A Farewell to English. He received the Irish-American Cultural Institute Award in 1980, the Irish Arts Council Award for the best book in Irish in 1986. During this time my mother primarily took on the role of chief breadwinner to support my father's dreams and so he remained at home to look after his children a lot of the time. However the call of Newcastle West, just 5 miles down the road from our home in the parish of Templeglantine was a strong one. More and more, he hitchhiked to town where many of his cronies were more than willing to patronize him with the local currency, the Pint. Over the next few years, his alcoholism and other troubles led to end of his marriage and he moved to Inchicore, Dublin in 1984. The publication of Inchicore Haiku' (1985) marked a return to English with a bang that dismayed some fans and critics but as he said himself, he needed a wider scope of expression than one language. Inchicore Haiku laid out in the Japanese style may be one his most intimate meditations reflecting on his estrangement from his family, friends and indeed nature itself in Limerick. Several English works followed including A Necklace of Wrens (1987), Poems to Younger Women (1989) and The Killing of Dreams (1992). These critically acclaimed works contributed to his winning the Irish American Cultural Institute Award in 1988, and the American-Ireland Fund Literary Award in 1990. During this period he was voted a member of Aosdana, a government-sponsored group of Irish artists. Selected and New Poems (1994), which contains work spanning his entire career and has been recently reprinted both in Ireland and in the USA. In 1999, the documentary film on his life and work: Michael Hartnett: Necklace of Wrens, was widely shown on Irish television to critical acclaim and won several prizes. Also, during the late 1990's, his poetry was added to the Irish final secondary school exam, the Leaving Certificate. Irish Folk singer Sean Tyrrell used his poem "The Ghost of Billy Mulvihill" as lyrics for a song on his album "The Orchard." His reputation had grown considerably, and Seamus Heaney wrote that he is "one of the truest, most tested and beloved voices in Irish poetry in our time." Alas, these events were to be his swan song. He attended the Listowel Writers Week in Kerry as he often had but went having not had a drink. This sudden withdrawal led to him experiencing a seizure in a bar and he was taken to a local hospital. He never fully recovered from that incident and had much trouble trying to write after that. The years of drinking, for a man so fragile, caught up with him and he died on October 13th, 1999 from Alcoholic Liver Syndrome. May his spirit mix with those great poets of old Ireland and revel in the nature he so loved. His legacy lives on in his writings and our memories but also in the form of the annual 'Eigse Michael Hartnett' poetry competition and festival in Newcastle West. Some more works will be published over the next few years, several of which have not been published before. Any additional facts or comments to this biography are welcome and it is considered a work in progress that will grow over time.
