Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin

Known to friends as Moley, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin is an Irish poet, singer and speaker. He grew up in Limerick in a household full of traditional music and scholarship. He began as a drummer, read music at University College Cork and took a master's in ethnomusicology at the Irish World Academy, then spent years teaching rap and vocal percussion to young people. In his twenties he set out to learn the old songs carried by his mother, the singer and theologian Nóirín Ní Riain, and the two of them, with his brother Owen, went on to sing together as a trio in Europe and North America.

With Owen and Nóirín he leads Turas d'Anam, Irish for 'journey of your soul': week-long journeys in Kerry and Cork that mix morning sessions of song, story, poetry and myth with visits to stone circles and pilgrimage sites, and the Inner Soul Circle, an online community that follows the Celtic year with monthly letters, recorded talks and live gatherings. The brothers also teach together at retreat centres such as Kripalu, often on Celtic spirituality and the figure of St Patrick, and have taught alongside the poet David Whyte, whose Many Rivers Press published Mícheál's first poetry collection, Early Music.