Born to Irish parents in the Bronx, New York in 1954, Michael Donaghy has been based in Britain since 1985. His debut collection, Shibboleth (1988), won both the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and his last collection Conjure took the Forward Prize in 2000. Donaghy, who is an accomplished musician with a strong interest in traditional Irish music, lists 'memory and history and music and sex and drinking' as the recurrent themes of his work.