After more than thirty years as an English teacher, Gill Barr retired to focus on her writing career. Her debut poetry collection A Wide River Divides Us was published by Cinnamon Press in 2025. Gill’s poems have appeared in many publications, including The New Humanist and The New European. She has received an award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast and has performed at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. She lives in a state of flux between Dorset and Derry/Londonderry where she was born.
The collection might be said to be in two parts. The first part relates to Gill’s childhood experience of the violent and historic change taking place in her divided home town in the early 1970s. These poems bear witness to the effects of the campaign of violence on a child caught in the crossfire. The second part of the collection takes readers out of time and into more fluid and unanchored places, as the poet attempts to integrate, to overcome division in its many forms. Fiona Sampson has described the collection as ‘a unique portrait of the artist as a survivor of troubled times.’