Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and The Seasons of Cullen Church, shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics, 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.



Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1344-c.1400) is rightly regarded as the Father of English Literature. His observant wit, his narrative skill and characterization, his linguistic invention, have been a well from which the language's greatest writers have drawn: Shakespeare, Pope, Austen, Dickens among them. He wrote his first poems as a young man, but it was in his thirties and forties that he composed his best known works: The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls,and Troilus and Criseyde, at a time when he rose to prominence in public, as well as literary, life. A courtier, a trade emissary and diplomat, he fought in the Hundred Years War and was captured and ransomed; his marriage into the family of John of Gaunt ensured his influence in political society. For more than a decade, he was engaged on his most famous work of all, The Canterbury Tales, until his death around 1400;there is no record of the precise date or the circumstances of his demise, despite vivid and colourful speculation.