Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in Limerick in 1954 and educated at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Joint winner of the Poetry Ireland/Co-Operation North Sense of Place competition in 1991, a selection of her work was published in How High the Moon. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1990, was a prizewinner in the 1992 Patrick Kavanagh Awards, and was shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in 1996. She published This Hour of the Tide (Salmon, 1994), and the blue globe (Blackstaff Press, 1998). Her first novel, One Room an Everywhere, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2003. She was writer-in-residence for the City of Dublin, (1994) and University College Dublin (2002). Suntrap, her third collection of poems, is due from Blackstaff Press in March 2007.