Staff Profile

Tara Bergin is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Savage Tales ('ground-breaking, innovative form' - Irish Times), which won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, 2024. Her first collection, This is Yarrow (Carcanet, 2013) won the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second book, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet, 2017), was named as one of the poetry books of the year by The Times and The Irish Times, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes.

Tara Bergin’s most recent book, Savage Tales (winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, shortlisted for the Derek Walcott and Piggot poetry prizes) was described as an epigrammatic, fragmentary text that ‘underlines her position as one of our most exciting poets’ and ‘challenges what we expect the lyric to do’ (Irish Times, 2023). In both her poetry and her scholarship, Tara has established an area of specialism in the transformative influence of translation on the translator, and vice-versa, including collaborative articles with Judit Mudriczki (Modern Poetry in Translation) and Marina Tsvetkova (Translation and Literature), and chapters in Ted Hughes in Context (Cambridge University Press) and Translating Holocaust Literature (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Her research explores the ways in which both found and missing matter can affect the world of the poem, looking in particular at the uses of ‘rough literals’ and their effect on modern poetics. Tara wrote her MLitt thesis on translations of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and her PhD on the influence of post-Holocaust poetry in translation on Ted Hughes’s Crow.

To be able to seize the whole of one’s ability like a little ball. – Kafka

Tara Bergin teaches Undergraduate and Postgraduate modules on writing poetry and creative practice.

She has supervised two PhDs to completion, both through the Northern Bridge scholarship, and currently supervises a further 4 doctoral candidates, all of them Northern Bridge funded. She supervises PhDs with a particular focus on the practice of poetic translation and methods of creativity.

Tara’s area of specialism at the School of English is the cross-over between creative and critical writing, in particular with regard to poetic translation, found poetry, and ‘ekphrasis’ - arguably all related practices. 

In her classes, students are encouraged to read as well as write, and to explore the effect of voice, tone and persona in poetry, as well as the blurring of boundaries between invention, intervention, and documentary.

Tara leads ‘The Alternative Criticism Workshop’, which she set-up for Creative Writing PhD students to discuss the merits and pitfalls of the experimental essay.

Tara teaches two days a week at Newcastle (Tues. & Wed. in Semester 2)

Room: 3.14, 3rd Floor, Percy Building