Matthew Sweeney, the Irish poet known for collections like Black Moon, The Night Post, and My Life as a Painter, died Sunday, August 5 at the age of 66, the Bookseller reported. The cause of death was motor neuron disease.
Sweeney published his most recent collection, My Life as a Painter, earlier this year. He was the author of more than a dozen other collections, and his 2007 collection Black Moon was shortlisted for both the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Sweeney also dabbled in fiction: in 2012 he published Death Comes for the Poets, a satirical crime thriller co-written with English poet John Hartley Williams.
Born in Lifford, Ireland, Sweeney went on to study German and English at the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Freiburg in Freiburg, Germany. He received the Cholmondeley Award and the Arts Council England Writers Award and was a member of Aosdána, "an Irish association which honors outstanding contributions to the creative arts."
Sweeney, who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2017 and lost his sister to the same condition in 2009, told the Irish Examiner earlier this year that he would not let the diagnosis stop him from writing. In one of many tributes from the poetry community, poet Patrick Cotter wrote on Twitter that Sweeney "put up a spirited fight against the reaper in the past week and wrote up a storm in these last months of life."