Patrick MacGill

Born in Glenties, County Donegal, Patrick MacGill left school young and worked as a farm servant and later as a navvy, part of the rough world of seasonal and itinerant labor that would shape his writing. Those early experiences gave his work an unusual directness and sympathy for people living on the edge.

He first became widely known for poems and sketches drawn from laboring life, which earned him the nickname "The Navvy Poet." He went on to write novels, autobiographical books, and war writing, becoming especially associated with stories of Irish workers abroad and with First World War experience.

MacGill also worked as a journalist, and his books helped preserve a side of Irish and British social history that was often overlooked. Readers still return to him for his plainspoken voice, strong sense of place, and the feeling that he wrote from life rather than from a distance.