RITA ANN HIGGINS was born in 1955 in Galway, Ireland, where she still lives. Her first five poetry collections were published by Salmon:
Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986);
Witch in the Bushes (1988);
Goddess and Witch (1990);
Philomena’s Revenge (1992); and,
Higher Purchase (1996), as well as a memoir
Hurting God (2010). Bloodaxe Books published her next five collections:
Sunny Side Plucked (1996);
An Awful Racket (2001);
Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems in May 2005 to mark her 50th birthday;
Ireland is Changing Mother (2011), and
Tongulish (2016). Her plays include:
Face Licker Come Home (Salmon, 1991);
God of the Hatch Man (1992),
Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993); and
Down All the Roundabouts (1999). In 2004, she wrote a screenplay entitled
The Big Break. In 2008 she wrote a play,
The Empty Frame, inspired by Hanna Greally, and in 2008 a play for radio,
The Plastic Bag. She has edited:
Out the Clara Road: The Offaly Anthology in 1999; and
Word and Image: a collection of poems from Sunderland Women’s Centre and Washington Bridge Centre (2000). She co-edited
FIZZ: Poetry of resistance and challenge, an anthology written by young people, in 2004. She was Galway County’s Writer-in-Residence in 1987, Writer-in-Residence at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 1994-95, and Writer-in-Residence for Offaly County Council in 1998-99. She was Green Honors Professor at Texas Christian University in October 2000. She won the Peadar O'Donnell Award in 1989 and has received several Arts Council of Ireland bursaries. Her collection
Sunny Side Plucked was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was made an honorary fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University in November 2006. She is a member of Aosdána.
Our Killer City, a book of essays with poems, appeared from Salmon in 2019. In 2018 she wrote
Straois / The Smirk, an Irish-language screenplay. In 2020, during the Covid-19 crisis, Rita Ann became The People’s Pandemic Poet Laureate for the Brendan O’Connor Show on RTE Radio 1.
