Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at the age of eighteen. She studied in Trinity College, Dublin and did postgraduate work in the University of East Anglia, the University of UIster, and in 2005 was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing at Queen's University Belfast. She has won various awards including the

Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007, and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year. In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. She has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the form of Individual Arts, ACES and Travel Awards. She was commissioned to write a poem on the Crown Bar in Belfast for a BBC documentary in 2008. A limited edition pamphlet, The Nunwell Letter, appeared in June 2019 of her poem written for the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Bursary awarded in 2017 to research John Donne's wife, Ann More's stay on the

Isle of Wight in 1611, Some of her work has been translated into German and Dutch. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University, and taught English in St Dominic's Grammar School in Belfast. The Work of a Winter, her debut collection of poetry, was launched in December 2017, and is currently in its second edition. The collection was shortlisted for the 2019 Shine/Strong Award. Arlen House

Strabane, a long poem, in 2020.