AFRIC MCGLINCHEY
​About Afric
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Afric is an Irish-born, multi-award-winning, poet, reviewer and mentor.
Her most recent poetry collection, À la Belle Étoile – the odyssey of Jeanne Baré, gives voice to the first woman to circumnavigate the globe – an eighteenth century herbalist who disguised herself as a man to gain passage on board a global expedition, and returned to France with thousands of tropical plants previously unseen in Europe.
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Other collections include The lucky star of hidden things, which takes its title from a translation of 'Sadalachbia', the name given to a star whose appearance signals to nomads that it's time to move to greener pastures; Ghost of the Fisher Cat, set loosely in medieval Paris, and Tied to the Wind, a prose poetry narrative of her African / Irish childhood (Broken Sleep Books, 2021).
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She has also published two surrealist chapbooks, Invisible Insane (SurVision, 2019) and The Throat Bird (2024).
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Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies, including Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry International and the Oxford Climate Change Anthology. Poems have featured in Poethead, the Rochford Street Review, and Numero Cinq and broadcast on RTÉ’s Poetry Programme and Arena. Her work has been translated into Italian, Irish, Spanish, Polish and Romanian.
Her first two collections have been translated into Italian and published by Casa Editrice L'Arcolaio, and Tied to the Wind has been translated into Macedonian.
Awards and Recognition
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Named one of Ireland's 'Rising Poets' by Poetry Ireland Review (Issue 118), Afric has received the Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry, the Northern Liberties Poetry Prize (USA) and the Poets Meet Politics Prize. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, the Piggott, Poetry Now and the Forward Prize for Best Collection; longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize; and placed or been highly commended in competitions including the Bridport, Magma, Oxford Sci-Po, and Saboteur Awards.
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She has read at Poetry Africa (Durban, 2013), represented Ireland on the Italo-Irish Literary Exchange (2014) and was invited by Poetry Ireland to read at the Iowa Festival in 2016. She gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland, for their awarding of Agility Awards and two Literature Bursaries.
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Afric is currently completing an auto-fictional memoir.​​​
Reviews
Paul Durcan
Judge of Hennessy Poetry Award
Afric McGlinchey belongs to an endangered species: she sees the world through the eyes of her soul.
Susan Millar du Mars
in Skylight 47
You’ll want to eat her words like figs.
mia Gallagher
author of Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland
Afric McGlinchey’s long-form debut steals beguilingly across the spiderweb between poetry, memoir and novel, offering an exquisitely rendered narrative of a young, hurting, growing life. Lush, sensitive, harrowing, gloriously written.
Jim Maguire
The Music Field
It's a heck of a book... I kept thinking of Les Murray... There was an overall feeling of stepping into a physically alive bazaar - and exotic richness and sophistication but always something human... many standout poems of such substance and ambition - and sheer accomplishment.
Dave lordan
in Southword
​McGlinchey's strength lies in her ability to record the noisome flux of the world.
Sara baume
author of A Line Made by Walking
Tied to the Wind is a book of intense sensations, and kaleidoscopic atmosphere. I could almost feel its heat, smell its exotic fragrances. Beautiful and transporting.
Ryan rushton
The Skinny Mag
Afric McGlinchey’s poems….work a plethora of intriguing images into beguiling narratives and have something of John Ashbery about them.
EMMANUEL SIGAUKE
in Munyori Literary Journal
An exciting poet with the true nature of a nomad.
Grace wells
author of When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things
I loved Afric McGlinchey’s lyrical and haunting memoir. Simultaneously intimate and epic, McGlinchey’s search for belonging voyages the reader through a sequence of unforgettable landscapes, braiding beauty and challenge into a book that lingers long in the reader’s heart.