Martina Evans

Martina Evans (born 1961) is an Irish poet and novelist who lives in London.

Biography Evans (née Cotter) was born in Burnfort, County Cork in 1961, the youngest of ten children. Her parents had a shop, bar and petrol pumps in the village. Her interest was in English literature but her parents wanted her to train as a radiographer. She trained in Dublin and after marriage, emigrated with her husband to London. She worked in Whittington Hospital for 15 years and did a degree in English and Philosophy with the Open University. She wrote intermittently during that period, but it was after her father's death in 1988 which released a burst of poetry that she turned to literature full-time. For some years she taught creative writing at institutions such as Birkbeck, University of London and the City Literary Institute, London. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and reviews for the Irish Times.

Of her own creative process, Evans has said: "Memory is the muse" and "Time is the best editor". Burnfort, Las Vegas, Anvil Press Poetry,2014 The Windows of Graceland: New and Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, 2016. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, Carcanet Press,2018 American Mules, Carcanet Press. 2021. The Coming Thing, Carcanet Press. 2023.

Novels Midnight Feast, Sinclair-Stevenson 1996, Vintage 1998 The Glass Mountain, Sinclair-Stevenson 1997, Vintage 1998 No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors, Bloomsbury, 2001

Prose poems Petrol, Anvil Press, 2012 The Glass Mountain, Bloom Books, 2013

Awards and honours 1995 Betty Trask Award for Midnight Feast In 2024 The Coming Thing'' was shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize