Graham Allen

Graham Allen (born 23 December 1963) is a writer and academic from Cork city, Ireland. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Madhouse System (2016) and The One That Got Away (2014). He is a former recipient of the Listowel Single Poem Prize, awarded each year at Listowel Writers' Week. As a literary critic, he has published numerous books, including Harold Bloom: Towards a Poetics of Conflict (1994), Intertextuality (2000), and Roland Barthes (2003). Scholarship Allen is Professor of Literature at University College Cork. His book for Routledge's New Critical Idiom series, Intertextuality (2000), had a second edition in 2011 and eight re-prints since first publication. In 2008, he published a book on Frankenstein and a monograph on Mary Shelley. He published a monograph on Harold Bloom, Harold Bloom: Towards a Poetics of Conflict (1994), and later co-edited the Salt Companion to Harold Bloom (2007). Two of his books, Intertextuality (2000) and Roland Barthes (2003), have been translated into Indonesian Japanese, Korean, and Persian. Creative writing Allen has had two collections of poetry published by New Binary Press, The Madhouse System (2016) and The One That Got Away (2014). His poetry tends to deal with social and political injustices. Both of his collections have been positively reviewed. Reviewing Allen's work in Southword journal, Roisin Kelly writes: "These are the words we need to hear in times like these. I am glad that Allen has seen fit to tell us what we are in danger of forgetting." His elegy to David Bowie, included in The Madhouse System, was selected by RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, as their poem of the week in December 2016. Allen's first collection of poetry, The One That Got Away, was shortlisted for the 2015 Shine/Strong Award, while the manuscript was nominated for Salt Publishing's Crashaw Prize and the Munster Literature Centre's Fool For Poetry Prize.