Richard Murphy

Richard Kerr Murphy (6 August 1927 – 30 January 2018) was an Anglo-Irish poet.

Biography

Early years Murphy was born to an Anglo-Irish family at Milford House, near the County Mayo–Galway border, in 1927. He spent much of his early childhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where his father William Lindsay Murphy served in the Colonial Service and was active as mayor of Colombo, later becoming Governor General of the Bahamas (in succession to the Duke of Windsor).

Return to Ireland In 1954, he settled in Cleggan, on the coast of Galway. Several years later, in 1959, he purchased and renovated the Ave Maria, a traditional hooker-type boat, from Inishbofin fisherman, Michael Schofield, which he used to ferry visitors to the island. From 1971, he was a poet-in-residence at nine American universities, in Princeton turning his office also into his bedroom, Joyce Carol Oates writing a short story about this. In later years he lived in Sri Lanka, having previously divided his time between Durban, South Africa, where his daughter and her family reside, and Dublin. He was the maternal grandfather of YouTuber Caspar Lee. A memoir of his life and times, The Kick, was published by Granta in 2002, constructed from detailed diaries kept over the course of five decades.

Murphy died at his Sri Lanka home on 30 January 2018.

Awards and honours AE Memorial Award for Poetry, 1951 First prize, Guinness Awards, 1962 British Arts Council Award, 1967 and 1976 Irish Arts Council Award (Marten Toonder), 1980 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1969 Member of Aosdána, Ireland, 1982 American Irish Foundation Literary Award, 1983 Included in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, 1985 Poetry Book Society Translation Award, London, 1989 Society of Authors Foundation Award, 2002