Michael Donaghy was born to Irish parents, and grew up amongst the Irish community in the Bronx, New York. He studied at Fordham, and began a PhD at the University of Chicago. Becoming dismayed with academia (of his experiences at the time, he wrote 'gradually I became aware that professing English because I loved poems was like practising vivisection because I loved dogs'), he dropped out of the PhD program to pursue a career in writing and in traditional Irish music. In Chicago he met his future partner, Maddy Paxman, and joined her in London in the mid-1980s. Here he spent the rest of his life, writing, teaching and playing music. In September 2004, Donaghy died of a brain haemorrhage. He was fifty years old. At the time of his death he had long been in the front rank of British poets, a hugely popular performer (who would always recite entirely form memory), and an influential teacher.

Donaghy published only three volumes of poetry in his lifetime: Shibboleth (1988), Errata (1993) and Conjure (2000). Safest , his final collection, was published posthumously in 2005. The paperback edition of his Collected Poems, including some previously unseen work, will be published in October 2014.