About the Bard
Stephen Murphy rose to national prominence in 2014 when a video for a poem called Was it for this? was recorded outside his barn in North Leitrim and uploaded to YouTube. Within a day the video took hold, and was shared by prominent politicians and journalists alike, and it served as a clarion call to what would go on to become the Right2Water movement, one of the largest cross-party political campaigns in the history of the Irish state. In October 2014 he was invited to deliver the poem outside the GPO on O'Connell Street in Dublin, and subsequently became the defacto poet in residence for the movement itself, performing his original work at six of the nine national demonstrations, to hundreds of thousands of people.
The impact of his work and his growing reputation in performance circles in Ireland meant that Stephen was invited to take part in 'Glórtha 1916' in Liberty Hall on Easter Saturday, 2016, and was subsequently the only poet to perform at the Citizens' Centenary of the Easter Rising on the 24th of April of the same year, one hundred years to the day since Padraig Pearse read out the proclamation of the Irish Republic in the same place.
In June 2016, Stephen launched Mac Tíre - Of Land & Man, a collaboration of his poetry set to music by members of the seminal Irish bands Whipping Boy and Kíla. In October of the same year Stephen was back on stage, this time delivering a poem called 'Before you push the chair' to a packed Abbey Theatre, who collectively rose to give him a standing ovation when he finished. The crowd included the President at the time Michael D. Higgins, who would later interrupt his own speech about the late Kerry poet Brendan Kennelly to call Stephen “A splendid, courageous, and gifted young poet” whose work brought to mind the American poet Allen Ginsberg and his epic poem, 'Howl.' President Higgins would later go on to write to Stephen, saying his work is “A precious contribution to our human condition, and joyful too in its possibilities envisaged”, and invited him to perform at the Bloomsday Garden party in June 2017 at Áras an Uachtaráin.
On moving to Limerick, Stephen completed a Masters in Creative Writing in the University of Limerick, focusing specifically on furthering his capabilities in prose writing while working fulltime in a live performance environment as a poet. In July of 2018 a recording of Before you push the chair was recorded in John B. Keane's pub in Listowel, and amassed millions of views online. Coming off the back of its relative success, he was invited to give talks at a series of events, and to take part in panel discussions alongside clinical psychologists and a broad range of Mental Health professionals. The reaction to the poem was both intense and over-whelming, but in many ways the relative 'success' of it made him realise the illusory nature of the online paradigm and our collective addiction to its superficial nature.
The beginning of the pandemic turned Stephen's world inside out and upside-down, when he became seriously ill just a few days after being on stage at a sold-out gig in the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. The following number of years saw an enormous upheaval in his personal life, and following a prolonged battle with illness resulted in life-changing surgeries in both 2021 and 2024. He has still managed to write prolifically in that time, though the nature and themes of his work have changed dramatically, including an hour long epic poem called A Misty Morning, (that's been described as “A cross between At Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien and Animal Farm by George Orwell”), and Goldilocks Returns, his first novella that was released in November 2024. He lives and writes in the heart of the Kingdom of Kerry, in the wildest part of Ireland.