With its blend of dark humour and lyrical craft, it's no surprise that Ciaran O'Driscoll's poetry has received international acclaim. His work combines a killer sense of humour with the acumen and verbal dexterity gained over a lifetime creating and teaching art and literature. He has read from his work and lectured on art and literature throughout Europe and America.

O’Driscoll has five poetry collections to his credit. The first of these, Gog and Magog, was published by Salmon in 1987, and re-issued on the internet by the Irish Literary Revival in 2006. His Moving On, Still There: New & Selected Poems was published by Dedalus in 2001. A dual language edition (in Italian and English) of his fourth collection of poems, The Old Women of Magione, was published by Volumnia Editrice in September 2006, the same year that Pighog published Surreal Man.

Among the many awards O’Driscoll has won are the James Joyce Literary Millennium Prize and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His election in 2007 to the Aosdána, an institution established by the Irish Arts Council to honour artists and writers who have made an outstanding contribution to art and literature confirms O'Driscoll's position as one of the leading Irish poets of his generation. O’Driscoll was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 1943, and now lives in Limerick.