Dennis O'Driscoll was born in Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland in 1954. He has published eight books of poetry, three chapbooks and a collection of essays and reviews. He has also edited and compiled contemporary quotations about poets and poetry, and published a book of his dialogues with Seamus Heaney. He is a member of Aosdána.

His poetry publications include Kist (Dolmen Press, 1982), Hidden Extras (Anvil Press, London/Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1987), Long Story Short (Anvil Press/Dedalus Press, 1993), Quality Time (Anvil Press, 1997), Weather Permitting (Anvil Press, 1999), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize 2001, Exemplary Damages (Anvil Press, 2002) and Reality Check (Anvil Press, 2007; Copper Canyon Press, 2008), shortlisted for the Irish Times / Poetry Now Prize 2008. His New and Selected Poems (Anvil Press, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. His chapbooks are The Bottom Line (Dedalus Editions, 1994), 50 O'clock (Happy Dragons Press, UK, 2005) and All the Living (Traffic Street Press, US, 2008).

Also a widely-published critic, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (Gallery Press, 2001) contains a selection of his essays and reviews. As a reviewer, he has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Parnassus, London Magazine, Poetry (Chicago), Harvard Review and A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press). He is editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and its American counterpart, Quote Poet Unquote (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). He published Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber; Farrar Straus and Giroux) in 2008.

He has written extensively about poetry and visual art; and his own poems evoke works by artists and sculptors as various as Fernando Botero, John Luke, Cecily Brennan and Osias Beert. ‘Skywriting’, his longest poem to date, is essentially a homage to the art of painting. He opened Patrick Scott’s retrospective at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in 2002 and contributed an essay to the catalogue for Martin Gale’s major exhibition in the Nissan Art Project series at the RHA in 2004. His monograph responding to the RHA’s I Not I exhibition (Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, Philip Guston) was published by the academy in 2006. Among his many other catalogue notes was one for Tony O’Malley’s ‘50 Years: A Selective Retrospective of Works on Paper’, Taylor Galleries, 2002.

His awards include the Lannan Foundation’s Literary Award in 1999, the 2005 E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2006 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies in Minnesota