Notable for her Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize-winning poetry collection The Flower Master (1982), as well as for her Cheltenham Prize-winning work On Ballycastle Beach (1989), McGuckian is also recognized for her acclaimed collection The Book of the Angel (2004), as well as for her award-winning individual poem "She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace."
She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Queens University, Belfast. In the early 1980s, she published her first poems in anthologies titled Portrait of Joanna and All The Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems.
She translated into English Irish Gaelic writer Nuala Nu Dhomhnail's poetry collection The Water Horse.
Born Maeve McCaughan, she is the daughter of Hugh and Margaret McCaughan, and she and her five siblings grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the late 1970s, she married fellow poet John McGuckian.
Her nonfiction work Horsepower Pass By! (1999) examines the poetry of Seamus Heaney.
