Seán Lysaght was born in Limerick. He was educated at UCD where he received a BA and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. He subsequently spent several years abroad, in Switzerland and Germany, before teaching for some time at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He lectured at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology until 2015. He lives with his wife Jessica in Westport, County Mayo.

He has published six poetry collections — The Clare Island Survey (1991), Scarecrow (1998), Erris (2002), The Mouth of a River (2007), Venetian Epigrams (2008, translations after Goethe), Selected Poems (2010) and Carnival Masks (2014). His collection, New Leaf, was published in 2022.

His work on the life and writings of Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist was published by Four Courts Press in 1998. His verse narrative of the life of Edmund Spenser was published under his own imprint in 2011 and Eagle Country in 2018.

In 2007 he received the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.

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