O Broin, Padraig

Person

O Broin, Padraig

• Byrne, J. Patrick

1908-1967

Padraig O Broin was born in 1908 in Ireland at Clontarf near Dublin. His family emigrated to Canada when he was five and settled in Toronto. O Broin became interested in poetry after hearing a poem by W.B Yeats read at a meeting of the Scottish Society in Toronto in 1932. In 1933, he attended a meeting of the Canadian Literature Club and met its founder, Donald Graham French, an editor at McClelland and Stewart. With French, he began publishing a magazine, Writer’s Studio, where he also published his own poems. In 1939, O Broin set up his press, the Clontarf Press, and issued broadsides and pamphlets of his own poems. From 1952 to 1954, he edited and produced, with Iain MacKay, a Gaelic magazine called Irisleabhar Ceilteach. In 1955, he began publishing his own Gaelic literary magazine, Teangadoir. In 1957, he legally changed his name from J. Patrick Byrne to Padraig O Broin. He became increasingly interested in Canadian poetry in the early 1960s and in 1961 he began to publish Teangadoir in English and began featuring young Canadian poets like Gwendolyn MacEwen. From 1963 to 1965, O Broin served as editor of Canadian Poetry. He also published two collections of his work: Than any Star (1962) and No Casual Trespass (1967). He died in 1967 before he could complete a planned Gaelic lyric anthology.

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto