Doireann Ni Ghriofa

A Ghost in the Throat braids two lives: Ní Ghríofa's own, with four small children and a body entirely given over to feeding them, and Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the eighteenth-century noblewoman who found her husband killed, drank his blood, and made the keen that is one of the great poems in Irish. Ní Ghríofa translates it herself inside the book and shows the working. She writes in Irish and English, has published several collections in Irish, and calls the book a female text, which is the line everybody quotes back at her.