'Peter Fallon's poetry has become very tough and alive, like a just-cut holly stick. Snappy and weighty. Very strong, sharp savour - and where do you find that these days.'  — Ted Hughes

Peter Fallon was born in Germany in 1951 and grew up on his uncle's farm near Kells in County Meath. He is an Honours Graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where, in 1994, he was Writer Fellow in the English Department. At the age of eighteen he founded The Gallery Press which has published more than four hundred books of poems and plays by the country's finest established and emerging authors and which is recognized as Ireland’s pre-eminent literary publishing house. Among the writers it publishes are Derek Mahon, John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, John Banville, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Michael Hartnett. The Press has also published books by Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney. It publishes the plays and stories of Brian Friel. The Gallery Press’s early accomplishment was recognized by a Better Ireland Award in 1991.

Peter Fallon has given more than 200 readings at universities and colleges in the US — including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Emory University.  He has read in a dozen countries — in Europe, Canada (the Harbourfront Festival) and Japan.  He read at the inaugural International Writers’ Conference, Ottawa, and the first Dublin Writers’ Festival.  He has conducted workshops at The Irish Writers’ Centre, Cúirt (The International Writers’ Festival, Galway) and the Yeats International Summer School. In 1990 he edited, with Derek Mahon, the best-selling anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry.  He is one of the youngest contributors included in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: 550 A.D. to the present.

His own collections of poems include The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987), Eye to Eye (1992) and The Deerfield Series:  Strength of Heart (1997).  His selected poems, News of the World, was published in the US by Wake Forest University Press in 1993.  An expanded edition, News of the World: Selected and New Poems, was published in Ireland in 1998, included in the Irish Times’ ‘Books of the Year’, and reprinted twice. Ars Longa published a Romanian Translation in 2003. The Georgics of Virgil, a translation, was published in September 2004. A dramatization of Tarry Flynn, the novel by Patrick Kavanagh, received its first production "off Broadway" (in Pennsylvania, actually!) the same month. The Georgics was subsequently published by Oxford in its World's Classics series.

A new collection of poems, The Company of Horses, appeared in September 2007.

Peter Fallon received the 1993 O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute whose citation read:  Peter Fallon’s poetry has continued to flourish and deepen despite the extraordinary demands of his career as a publisher. The late poems of his most recent collection, Eye to Eye, are the finest he has written.  When the history of Irish poetry in the late twentieth century comes to be written, the name of Peter Fallon is sure to turn up everywhere.  

On 2 July 1995, The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland’s National Theatre, was filled to celebrate twenty-five years of Fallon’s publishing enterprise, The Gallery Press.  Readings were introduced by Seamus Heaney.  In her opening address, the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, enthused: ‘The Gallery Press has spent the last twenty-five years contributing towards bringing Irish poets and writers of plays and fiction to a wider world culture.  I warmly salute the enormous contribution Peter Fallon has made to the diverse and challenging voices in Ireland.’ On 6 February 2005, The Gallery Press quietly celebrated thirty-five years of publishing.

Peter Fallon has been Poet in Residence at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and, in the Spring of  2000, he was the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, PA, which conferred on him an Honorary Doctorate.  In 2003 he was elected to Aosdána, the association which ‘honours artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland’. He lives with his family in Loughcrew in County Meath.

PETER FALLON'S POETRY

'I have the greatest liking for Peter Fallon's poetry. It does not filter the world of the small farm for some urban reader; rather it takes him there. It does so without sentimentality, giving us for instance the brute weariness of farm work (Country Music) as well as the triumph of work well done (The Old Masters). On the whole, Fallon's words move artfully within the lexicon of the rural town; their poetry is in the rightness of naming and describing, the exact ear for the beat and savor of country speech, the honest tuning of the poet's feeling toward his chosen place.' — Richard Wilbur

‘Peter Fallon’s poetry confirms Keats’s notion that an intelligence becomes a soul through being schooled in a world of pains and troubles.  His poems are soul music of this sort, yet they also belong to a particular place and a particular speech:  his way of saying has become a way of seeing, eye to eye with griefs and crises he is emotionally well able for.  I admire his singular combination of gravity, obliquity, and tenderness.’   — Seamus Heaney

‘News of the World suggests that it is time to celebrate Peter Fallon not only as a poet of Ireland’s heartland but also to place him in the first rank of poets of his generation.’  — Shaun O’Connell

‘His own work is often centered in Oldcastle, County Meath, where he lives; he is a perceptive observer of and participant in its rural activities, minding sheep, dipping, lambing, roofing, making hay, mowing, attending the mart, being part of the community. He has an eye for natural objects – the beauty of chestnut, oak, whitethorn, laurel, ash. Delighting in the landscape and its creatures, he also writes with understanding and compassion about the superstitions and misfortunes that affect a small community. No one else has borne witness with such fidelity and grace to the everyday life of this rural place and no one else reproduces its sayings and dry wit with such immediacy . . . Fallon’s poetry has a deceptive simplicity and accessibility even as it affirms the values of endurance, survival and communal life.’  — Poetry International