Ciaran Carson
CIARAN CARSON was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.
He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Tain and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music.
Prizes and awards
1978 Eric Gregory Award
1987 Alice Hunt Bartlett Award The Irish for No
1990 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry Belfast Confetti
1993 T. S. Eliot Prize First Language: Poems
1997 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) The Star Factory
2003 Cholmondeley Award
2003 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Breaking News
2008 Costa Poetry Award (shortlist) For All We Know
2008 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) For All We Know
2010 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (shortlist) On The Night Watch
Forthcoming Works
Wake Forest University Press will be publishing companion paperback volumes of Ciaran Carson’s On The Night Watch and Until Before After late in the spring!
Miscellaneous News
From a review by Daisy Fried of Ciaran Carson’s Collected Poems in Poetry Magazine’s March 2010 issue: “…it’s a necessary volume. Carson, who was born and still lives in Belfast, and grew up speaking Irish, is a poet of witness to the Northern Irish conflict. He’s also compulsively playful, a colloquial, ultra-literary story-teller, who changes his formal game with almost every book. … Carson is so deliberate, so fastidiously lackadaisical, such a good yarn-spinner, and so fully there whenever he pauses, that he never loses you. Seeing where he’ll go next is enormous fun. … At his best, he’s better than almost anyone.”
Carson’s poem “The Tag” was featured in The New Yorker on February 10, 2010.
4/20/10 – The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland forced Ciaran Carson to postpone his American tour. Carson was scheduled to appear at Vanderbilt University for a poetry reading; however, the ash cloud over the European continent made it necessary to postpone the tour until next year.