Born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales, with his family. McGuinness is a member of Plaid Cymru and stood as a candidate for the party in Wales in the 2019 European Parliament election.
Work
McGuinness's production is divided between academic literary criticism and poetry. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours.
Literary criticism and academic work
Patrick McGuinness teaches French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. Among his academic publications there is a study of T. E. Hulme, an English literary critic and poet who was influenced by Bergson and who, in turn, had a strong influence on English modernism. He has also translated Stéphane Mallarmé, a major symbolist poet, and edited an anthology in French of symbolist and decadent poetry. He has edited the works of Marcel Schwob, a French symbolist and short story writer, a friend of Oscar Wilde, and has written on the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. McGuinness has also edited two volumes of the Argentinian-Welsh poet and novelist Lynette Roberts, highly appreciated by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves. According to McGuinness, Roberts is "one of the greatest female war poets" whose works "constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language." McGuinness writes about Lynette Roberts:
Poetry and novel
McGuinness published his first poetry collection, The Canals of Mars, in 2004. The book was translated into Italian. In 2009 Alexandra Buchler and Eva Klimentova translated McGuinness' poems from The Canals of Mars and 19th Century Blues into Czech In 2007 he published a poetry pamphlet, 19th Century Blues, which was a winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006.
His latest poetry collection is Jilted City, whose leitmotif is memory, the jilted city, the cité trahie. A sequence in the book called Blue Guide is about the train journeys made by the young McGuinness on the historic railway line, la ligne 162, between Brussels and Luxembourg. This sequence has been translated into French by Gilles Ortlieb, in the review Théodore Balmoral. The whole collection has been translated into Italian by Giorgia Sensi and published with the title L'età della sedia vuota, the title of one of the poems in the book, as a homage to the female experience and perspective of war, an empty chairon the beach as a symbol of a violent and irrational absence. Patrick McGuinness's first novel, The Last Hundred Days, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. A thriller dealing with the collapse of communism, it is set in Ceaușescu's Romania, one of the most paranoid totalitarian regimes where spying on the citizens' private lives threatens all human relationships. The protagonist is an English student teaching in Bucharest, where McGuinness himself lived in the years leading up to the revolution.
