W.R. Rodgers

W.R. Rodgers was born in 1909 in east Belfast. In 1931 he graduated with a BA in English Literature from Queen’s University Belfast before training as a Presbyterian minister. 
In 1935 he became minister at Cloveneden church in Loughgall, County Amagh. It was during this period that Rodgers began writing poetry; his first full-length collection, Awake! And Other Poems, followed in 1941. 
In 1946 he took up a scriptwriter post for the BBC in London, where he worked until 1952, the year in which he published his second collection, Europa and the Bull and Other Poems. In 1955, his radio play The Return Room was broadcast, and was quickly hailed as one of the finest radio broadcasts ever produced in Ireland. Rodgers died in 1969 and is buried in Loughgall.