Deirdre Gribbin

Who is Deirdre Gribbin?

Deirdre Gribbin is a composer from Northern Ireland. She studied at Queen's University Belfast where, at the age of twenty, she began to compose. Further studies were in London and in Denmark. Her first professional success came in 1991, when her piano piece Per Speculum in Aenigmate won the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Composition Prize.

Subsequent major works have included the piano quartet Jack B., the piano trio How to Make the Water Sound, the opera Hey Persephone!, the violin concerto Venus Blazing and the clarinet concerto Celestial Pied Piper, the latter composed in New York where she was a Fulbright Fellow in 1999-2000. Several of her works respond to the political climate of her homeland, such as the ensemble piece Tribe, the orchestral work Unity of Being, and her epic percussion concerto Goliath, premiered at the Belfast Festival in 2006.

She won an award in the 2003 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers with her orchestral work Empire States, and an Arts Foundation Award for her first opera, Hey Persephone!. She was Artistic Director of the London-based Society for the Promotion of New Music from 2003-05.