A Grafted Tongue (Author Biography)

Author Biography

John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 28, 1929, the third son of James Montague and Mary (Carney) Montague. The family was Irish, Montague’s father having immigrated to New York in 1925.

Times were hard in Brooklyn during the depression years, and, in 1933, Montague was sent with his brothers to rural Garvaghey in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to live with his aunts on their farm. In 1940 he won a scholarship to St. Patrick’s College, Armagh, from which he graduated in 1946. With the help of another scholarship, Montague attended University College, Dublin, from which he was awarded a B.A. in English and history in 1949 and an M.A. in Anglo-Irish literature in 1952.

The following year, Montague attended Yale Graduate School on a Fulbright Scholarship. Over the next three years, he studied at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Ireland in 1956, where he settled in Dublin, working as an editor at Bord Failte (Irish Tourist Board). Montague’s first volume of poetry, Forms of Exile, was published in 1958.

In 1961 Montague moved to Paris and became Paris correspondent of The Irish Times. His second poetry collection, Poisoned Lands, was published in the same year. During the 1960s, as he returned to visit the places where he grew up, Montague began working on the poems that would later be published as The Rough Field, the book that contains “A Grafted Tongue.” He also published the first of three volumes of short stories, Death of a Chieftain, and Other Stories in 1964, and two more volumes of poetry, A Chosen Light in 1967 and Tides in 1970.

After teaching at University College, Dublin, from 1968 to 1971, Montague took a position at University College, Cork, where he remained until 1988. During this period, he continued to publish frequently, including the poems in A Slow Dance (1975), and literary honors came his way. He was awarded the first Marten Toonder Award in 1977 and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award from the Poetry Society of Great Britain in 1978 for The Great Cloak. A Guggenheim award from 1979 to 1980 enabled Montague to complete his Selected Poems (1982) and the long poem, The Dead Kingdom (1984).

Since 1989, Montague has regularly taught fiction workshops at the State University of New York at Albany. His recent publications include the short stories in An Occasion of Sin (1992), The Love Poems (1992), Time in Armagh (1993), and Collected Poems (1995).

Montague has two daughters by his second wife, Evelyn Robson, whom he married in 1973.