Gerald Dawe was born on April 22, 1952 in Belfast, Northern Ireland to Norma Fitzgerald Bradshaw and Gordon Dawe. He attended Orangefield High School and lived in London prior to earning a B.A. from the New University of Ulster in 1974. For a short time, Dawe worked at Belfast Central Library. He was awarded a Major State Award for Postgraduate Research. He earned his M.A. in English at the University of Galway between 1974 and 1978. Dawe married Dorothea Melvin in 1979, and they had two children, Iarla and Olwen.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Dawe contributed reviews and essays on contemporary literature to Threshold, Fortnight, and Linen Hall Review. In 1978 Dawe published his first poetry collection, Sheltering Places, followed by The Lundys Letter (1985). He edited the critical collections The Younger Irish Poets (1982) and The Poet's Place: Essays on Ulster Literature and Society with John Wilson Foster (1985). In 1986 he founded and served as editor of the literary and cultural journal Krino with Aodan Mac Poilin.

During the following decades Dawe deepened his poetry production and broadened the scope of his publications on Irish literature, culture and history. His extensive output of poetry collections included Sunday School (1991), Heart of Hearts (1995), Lake Geneva (2003), Points West (2008), Selected Poems (2012), Mickey Finn’s Air (2014), Early Poems (2015), and The Last Peacock (2019). His criticism comprised: How's the Poetry Going? Literary Politics and Ireland Today (1991), The Rest is History (1998), Stray Dogs and Dark Horses: Selected Essays on Irish Writing and Criticism (2000), The Proper Word: Ireland, Poetry, and Politics (2007), The World as Province: Selected Prose, 1980-2008 (2009), Of War and Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (2015), and The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2018). Additionally, he wrote books reviews published in both literary journals and Irish newspapers and edited poetry editions of Charles Donnelly, Ethna MacCarthy, and Padriac Fiacc.

Dawe’s later-career writings merged criticism with reflection, as in My Mother City (2007) Conversations: Poets and Poetry (2011), The Stoic Man (2015), In Another World: Van Morrison and Belfast (2017), and Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles (2020).

Dawe was a teacher as well as a writer and scholar. In 1988 he took a position as lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. In 1996 he created the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity with fellow poet Brendan Kennelly, the first such program in Ireland. He became the director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in 1999 and was elected a Trinity Fellow in 2004. Dawe held visiting scholar posts at John J. Burns Library at Boston College (2005), Villanova University, Philadelphia (2009), and Pembroke College, Cambridge University (2016-2017). He retired from teaching in 2017.

Among Dawe's awards are the Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Poetry (1980 and 2005), Macauley Fellowship for Literature (1984), Hawthornden International Writers' Fellowship (1987), the Ledig-Rowohlt International Writers Fellowship (1999), and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish poetry (2024).

Gerald Dawe died in May of 2024 at the age of 72.

Sources

"Chartres Gerald Dawe." In Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2007. (Accessed April 1, 2020). Gale Document Number: GALE|H1000023838.

Dawe, Gerald. "Finding the language." The Southern Review 32, no. 2 (1996): 303. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed April 3, 2020). Gale Document Number: GALE|A18266432

“Gerald Dawe.” Trinity Writers portal printout, biographical notes about Dawe, Box 1, Folder 2, Gerald Dawe papers, MS.2000.016, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

"Gerald Dawe: Biography." Gerald Dawe, accessed January 6, 2020. https://www.gerald-dawe.net/about.

"Gerald Dawe, poet of 'the ordinary and the everyday', dies aged 72." The Irish Times, May 29, 2024. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/05/29/gerald-dawe-poet-of-the-ordinary-and-the-everyday-dies-aged-72/