Frank Ormsby was born in 1947, in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Queen's University in Belfast. Until 2010 he was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His collection The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award in the US. His retrospective Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. He was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, and has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award, given in memory of John Hewitt, and in 2002 the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the University of St Thomas at St Paul, Minnesota. Frank Ormsby served as the eighth Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2019 to 2022.